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LAST AND FIRST 



John Addington Symonds 

LAST AND FIRST 

BEING TWO ESSAYS: 
THE NEW SPIRIT and 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 



NICHOLAS L. BROWN 

NEW YORK MCMXIX 



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Copyright 1919 

BY 

NiCHOi,AS I^. Brown 



'COPYRIGHT '■^ff^Ktr 

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MAY -5 iSIS 



INTRODUCTION 

The two essays in this volume represent^ 
respectively J the first and the last most impor- 
tant contributions to literary criticism by John 
Addington Symonds, They are now published 
for the first time. 

The essay on Arthur Hugh Clough ap- 
peared in the Fortnightly Review for Decem- 
ber, 1868, four years before Symonds's first 
book. The Study of Dante, wa^ published. 
Symonds relates in Ms autobiography that he 
first heard of Clough from Professor Jowett. 
The famous scholar was so shocked by the news 
of dough's death that he could not hear 
Symonds's essay that evening. Jowett added 
— ''He {Clough) was the only man of genius, 
whom I knew to be a man of genius, that I 



have seen among the younger set at Balliol" 
This was in 1861. 

Symonds was attracted to Clough by the 
poet's scepticism and sympathized with his 
views. The essay reveals the liberal side of 
Symonds' s mind more clearly than many of his 
later works do. In 1869 Symonds helped the 
poet's widow to edit and arrange the prose re- 
mains of her husband, and she made a most 
grateful acknowledgment to Symonds in the 
Introduction for his part, Symonds never re* 
printed his essay on the poet, who is as famous 
for being the subject of Matthew Arnold's 
great elegy Thyrsis, as for his own great 
poems. For intellectual vigor, and purity of 
style, and as a penetrating critical study, the 
essay ranks high. 

The address on The New Spirit was pub- 
lished in the Fortnightly Review for March, 
1893, a month before Symonds died. It repre- 
sents his final impression of the Renaissance. 
He shows the similarity of the modern spirit in 
art and science to the spirit that prevailed in 
the 16th century. The last of his seven volumes 

B 



on the Renaissance had appeared in 1886. The 
great Humanist Movement was the theme of 
his prize essay at Oxford, And now towards 
the close of his life, he summed up his more 
mature views on a subject which had occupied 
him so many years. The esSay now appears in 
its entirety, 

Symonds was, with Pater and Arnold, one 
of the great Victorian creative critics. He was 
probably superior intellectually to Matthew 
Arnold, more reliable in his literary judg- 
ments and as a stylist he was more charming. 
He suffered from a spirit of Self-depreciation; 
it was only too prevalent throughout his auto- 
biography, and people took him at his own esti- 
mation. Even so fine a critic as Arthur Symons 
has left an unworthy and unjust estimate of 
him. 

Symonds will live in English literature. 
His studies of the Greek Poets, of the Renais- 
sance, his monographs on Dante, Boccaccio, 
Whitman, his critical essays and travels, are 
among the finest things in our language. Hii 
poems also, which are so little known, are of 



great merit. And hig autobiography and let- 
ters, edited by Mr. Horatio F. Brown, form 
one of the most poignant and artistic docu- 
ments in any literature, 

— Albeet Mordell. 

Philadelphia. 



10 



CONTENTS 

PAOK 

Thb New Spirit 15 

Arthur Hugh Ctoucn 65 



THE NEW SPIRIT. 

,(an analysis of the emancipation of the 
intellect in the fourteenth, fif- 
teenth and sixteenth centuries ) 



THE NEW SPIRIT. 



It was my honourable duty to read an English 
essay on "The Renaissance," in the theatre at 
Oxford, on the 17th of June, 1863. At that 
time confused and erroneous views were com- 
mon as to the meaning of the term Renais- 
sance, and as to the importance of the histori- 
cal period which it denotes. Even so able a 
thinker as G. W. F. Hegel, in his Philosophy 
of History, passed from the Middle Ages to 
the German Reformation with three pages of 
transition, in which he superficially alluded to 
the revival of learning, the efflorescence of the 
fine arts, and the discovery of America. 
Hegel, apparently, had not grasped the revo- 
lutionary character of humanism; its reaction 
against mediaeval methods of thinking; its 

15 



preparation of modern scientific criticism. 
But what revealed a deeper want of insight 
into the subject, was his failure to perceive 
that the Reformation owed its force as an in- 
tellectual movement — apart from mere revolt 
against ecclesiastical corruption — to the New 
Spirit of independence which had been lib- 
erated in Italy by the Renaissance. 

During the last thirty years rapid advance 
has been made toward a true knowledge of the 
Renaissance. A group of eminent writers in 
France, Germany, England, and Italy, have 
devoted their best energies to investigating its 
origins in the Middle Ages, explaining the 
conditions of its development, and analysing 
its specific character. Yet I feel that we are 
still very far from being able to give a plaus- 
ible theory of the causes which produced this 
reawakening of the human mind, or to define 
with absolute precision what was its vital 
essence. 

What I wrote in my early youth returns 

to my memory now; and I do not seem able, 

after thirty years of searching, to yield a bet- 

16 



ter account of the setiology of the Renaissance 
than I did then. Then I introduced my treat- 
ment of the subject with remarks upon the 
abysmal deeps of national personality, and the 
inscrutability of laws which govern human de- 
velopment, adding: ^ "These remarks, if gen- 
erally true, may be applied with special signifi- 
cance to the age of the Renaissance — that 
mighty period of dissolution and reconstruc- 
tion, of the reabsorption of old material, and 
of the development of new principles, of dis- 
coveries and inventions mutually strengthen- 
ing one another, and tending to diffuse and 
render permanent the power of man. If we 
ask, what was the Renaissance? the lovers of 
art will answer that it was the change pro- 
duced on painting, architecture, and sculpture, 
by the study of newly recovered antiques ; nor 
will they agree about the value of this change ; 
for some deplore it as the decadence of true 
inspiration, others hail it as the dawning of a 
brief but glorious day. The scholar means by 

(1) The Renaissance. Oxford, Henry Hammans, 
1863, p. a 

17 



the Renaissance that discovery of ancient 
manuscripts and that progress in philology 
which led to a correct knowledge of classical 
literature, to new systems of philosophy, to a 
fresh taste in poetry, to a deeper insight into 
language, and, finally, to the great Lutheran 
schism and the emancipation of modern 
thought. The jurist understands by the term 
a dissolution of old systems of law based upon 
the False Decretals, the acquisition of a true 
text of the Corpus Juris, and generally the 
opening of a new era for jurisprudence. Ask 
the historian of political Europe what marked 
the age of the Renaissance, and he will talk of 
the abolition of feudalism, of French interfer- 
ence in Italian affairs, of the tendency to cen- 
tralisation, of the growth of great monarchies, 
and of diplomacy, which was the instrument 
by which kings established their supremacy, 
and wrought out their schemes of self-ag- 
grandisement. Besides, we hear of the dis- 
covery of America, and of the exploration of 
the East; the true system of the world is ex- 
plained by Copernicus; Vesalius teaches us 

18 



how man is made ; printing, engraving, paper, 
the compass, gun-powder, all start suddenly 
into being to aid the dissolution of what is rot- 
ten and must perish, to strengthen and per- 
petuate the new and useful and life-giving. 
Yet, if we rightly consider the question, we 
shall find that neither one of these answers, nor 
yet indeed all of them together, can adequately 
explain the multiplicity and apparent incon- 
gruity of those phenomena which made the 
interval between 1450 and 1550 the most mar- 
vellous period that the world has ever known. 
In the word Renaissance, or palingenesis, in 
the idea of Europe arousing herself from the 
torpor of trance and incubation which weighed 
upon her for ten centuries, we detect a spiritual 
regeneration, a natural crisis, not to be ex- 
plained by this or that phenomenon of its de- 
velopment, but to be accepted as a gigantic 
movement for which at length the time was 
come, which had been anticipated by the 
throes of centuries, which was aided and ex- 
tended by external incidents, and which still 
continues to live and move and expand within 

19 



us, by virtue of its own power, and of the mar- 
vellous mechanical inventions that preserve to 
us inviolably each onward step in its progress 
towards maturity." 

It may be impossible to analyse the causes 
which produced this re-awakening of intellect- 
ual energy. But it is not beyond the scope of 
criticism to sketch out its essential character, 
and to describe the main conditions imder 
which it was effected. In the first place, we 
must bear steadily in mind the fact that the 
Renaissance was, above all things, a spiritual 
process, a reacquisition of mental lucidity and 
moral independence after centuries of purblind 
somnambulism. For this reason, I have 
elected to define the genius of Renaissance as 
the New Spirit; and I propose to consider, as 
broadly and generally as possible, what were 
the leading characteristics of this New Spirit. 

Antecedent circumstances, affecting the 
whole of Europe in varying degrees, rendered 
the emergence of spiritual liberty possible. 
These were the absorption of the Teutonic bar- 
barians into a common political system, at the 

20 



head of which stood the Holy Roman Church 
and the Holy Roman Empire ; the assimilation 
of one religious creed by all parts and parcels 
of the European community; the definition of 
those integers as separate nationalities, with 
languages of their own, and similar monarch- 
ical institutions; the possession by them all of 
one learned language in the Latin tongue; 
finally, the gradual relaxation of the mediaeval 
dualism of Church and Empire, and the high 
degree of autonomy and social comfort at- 
tained by the Italians. The reason why Italy 
took the lead in the Renaissance may be found 
not only in her favourable geographical and 
economical conditions, but also in her un- 
broken connection with the antique past, her 
intolerance of feudalism, and her essentially 
mundane temperament. The power of the 
Empire had been sapped by its localization in 
Germany, by the rivalries of monarchies and 
republics claiming independence, and by the 
fierce war waged against the House of Hohen- 
stauifen through successive papacies. The au- 
thority of the Church had been weakened by 

21 



her Avignonian exile, by the councils of Con- 
stance and Basle, by Wycliffe and the Lollards 
in England, by the Hussites in Bohemia, by 
the heretics of Provence, the Paterines of 
Italy. 

The Occidental nations, in the last years of 
the Middle Ages, had thus attained a point at 
which, without being conscious of a coming 
change, they were ready to enter upon a new 
epoch of civilization. We might compare them 
to a liquid mass of molten metal at the moment 
when it is about to settle down and solidify. 
When that happens, it is not the whole mass 
which suddenly becomes stationary, but the 
curdling process begins in what may be called 
the most propitious quarter. Here a crust or a 
cake forms, and this acts like a nucleus for the 
surrounding fluid substance. Something of the 
same sort occurs in all processes of crystalliza- 
tion or gelation. These analogies are clearly 
defective; for what took place at the begin- 
ning of the Renaissance ought properly to be 
compared to organic rather than to solidifying 
change. We could perhaps discover a better 

22 



metaphor in embryology, appealing to that 
speck in the ovum out of which the complex 
vital structure has to be evolved. However, 
let that pass. In the phenomenon with which 
we are now occupied, the propitious quarter, 
the nucleus of the ovum, was Italy. The 
reasons for this priority of the Italians have 
been already assigned. They never broke with 
the Roman past. They absorbed the Ostro- 
goths and Lombards. They resisted feudal- 
ism. They kept their language close to Latin. 
Their cities bore antique names, and abounded 
in monuments of the classical past. They 
created the Roman Church, and at the same 
time they were the least imposed on by its 
spiritual pretensions. Farther than all the 
sister-nations, they had advanced upon the path 
of material and social prosperity. They held 
the trade of the world in their grasp. They 
lived in diplomatical and commercial relations 
with the East, which was only known to Eng- 
lishmen and Franks and Germans as the land 
of hated unbelievers. They owned no allegi- 
ance to kings, and were loosely bound together 

28 



in a mesh of independent, mutually repellent 
and attractive city-states. It devolved upon 
them therefore to revive the positive and plastic 
genius of the antique world, and by combining 
this with what remained alive of medisevalism, 
to give form and substance to that hybrid 
which I have called the New Spirit. 

These considerations help us to understand 
the importance of the Emperor Frederick II. 
in the history of the Renaissance; the hatred 
with which he inspired orthodox Christians ; his 
precocious prefigurement of the coming epoch. 
I must repeat that the Renaissance was essen- 
tially intellectual — an outburst of mental and 
moral independence. The first and leading 
note of it is the reassertion of the individual in 
his rights to think and feel, to shape his con- 
duct according to the dictates of his reason. 
The resurgence of personality in the realm of 
thought lies at the root of the whole matter. In 
the sphere of action, personality played freely 
enough throughout the Middle Ages. But 
men were agreed then to accept a certain sys- 
tem of thought, elaborated mainly by Church- 

24 



men. Dominant conceptions prevailed. We 
have the spectacle of whole nations in move- 
ment towards the Holy Land, governed by a 
romantic idea. We have the no less instructive 
spectacle of Henry of England doing penance 
at the shrine of Becket, of Henry of Germany 
kneeling in the snow at Canossa. But now 
comes Frederick II., the most mundane and 
humane of rulers, so far as we can judge him 
through the mists of prejudice and calumny; 
also the most sceptical, most positive, perhaps 
most cynical of thinkers. He undertakes a 
Crusade, and brings it to a not inglorious con- 
clusion by a treaty with the Sultan. He stocks 
his castles of Apuha with Saracen troops, and 
colonizes waste lands with infidels. His court 
is the rallying-point for free-thinkers, artists, 
men of letters, selected without regard for 
creed or nationality. He is an incarnation of 
the first effective force of the Renaissance — 
personahty in the sphere of thought, self-con- 
scious of its aims, self-governed in its conduct. 
During this shifting of the scenes from 
mediaeval to modern modes of thinking, in this 



25 



gestation of the New Spirit and creation of 
the hybrid which shall fuse past and future to 
form our present, it is impossible to distinguish 
objects very clearly. The protagonists of the 
movement often seem to contradict themselves. 
Frederick II. issues edicts against the Cathari 
and Paterini, probably because he regarded 
them as social anarchists, possibly because he 
strove in his diplomacy to humor the Church. 
Out of the midst of positive and practical Italy 
arise the last great flaming stars of Christian 
faith, St. Francis and St. Dominic. The 
Church is still so vital that she comprehends the 
utility of incorporating the Umbrian visionary 
and the Spanish tyrant over souls into her sys- 
tem. Still, whether we regard Frederick II., 
or Francis and Dominic, the fact of sharply 
defined individuality emerges into prominence. 
Dante, whose master-work, the Divine 
Comedy, is rightly held to be the everlasting 
monument of mediasvalism on the eve of disso- 
lution, illustrates the same fact. He remained 
within the sphere of mediaeval ideas in his reli- 
gious creed, his philosophy, his political ideals. 

26 



But he displayed his personal independence, 
the freedom of his intellect, not merely in the 
critical judgments he passed upon the lowest 
and the most exalted of his predecessors and 
contemporaries, not merely in the vivid picture 
he left of Italy seething in internecine civic 
struggles, but also, and far more effectively, in 
the quality of his great epic. Whatever else 
the Divine Comedy may be, it is the record of 
the man who made it, the intense and fiery self - 
delineation of a haughty spirit. Previous 
literature of the mediaeval epoch had given 
birth to nothing of the sort. At one bound art 
leapt from the region of dim generalities or 
genial arras-work, into that of incisive defini- 
tions and glyptic purity of outline. The New 
Spirit, in its first phase of personality, self- 
conscious and self-assertive, shone forth 
through Dante's poem, albeit the atmosphere 
he breathed, the material he handled, were still 
mediaeval. 

The second phase in this genesis of the New 
Spirit may be described as Curiosity, Person- 
ality had shaken itself to some extent free. In 

27 



what are called the heresies of the mediaeval 
epoch, it showed a will to investigate principles, 
to interrogate Church doctrine, to reconstitute 
the scheme of society upon some fresh basis. 
Personality began to vindicate the rights of the 
natural man, queried the condemnation of the 
flesh and senses, lusted after the world in 
thought as well as deed. In men like Wychff e 
and Huss it disputed the sole right of clerical 
tradition to settle interpretations of Scripture. 
In Joachim of Flora it anticipated a revelation 
superior to that of Christ and his Apostles. In 
the Goliardi and the lyrists of Provence, it gave 
the agreeable form of literary art to appetites 
and sentiments. In the school of the Averr- 
hoists it undermined those postulates and 
axioms upon which the huge edifice of scholas- 
ticism, triumphant in Thomas of Aquino, had 
been raised. In the court of Frederick II. it 
exhibited a temper akin to that of Gallio. Pre- 
pared by these processes of incipient scepti- 
cism, which were still carried on within the ring- 
fence of mediaeval habits of thought, semi- 
emancipated personality now turned with eager 

28 



inquisitive eyes to the vast neglected store of 
human experience funded in antique literature. 
Here stretched a whole untraveled empire of 
the intellect. The men of the Middle Ages, 
though it lay open to them, had wilfully 
refused to explore that realm; or, when they 
crossed its borders, they arrived with preju- 
dices and preoccupations which obscured their 
mental vision. The pioneers of the New Spirit, 
exhilarated by the novelty of their experience, 
surveyed fertile and abundant regions, beyond 
the jurisdiction, untainted by the trail, of 
ecclesiastical authority. Into this paradise of 
mind and imagination they leapt like boys, for 
the pure pleasure of the excursion, without any 
settled intention of rebelling against Mother 
Church. Their keenly awakened personality 
made them desire to know what man had been 
under diverse intellectual and moral conditions, 
when no thoughts oppressed him of damnation 
and eternity. Seeking thus, they arrived at a 
superior self-knowledge, and became aw are of 
their own liberty. To their ineffable satisfac- 

29 



tion they entered into the possession of a nobler 
and serener earth. 

"Largior hie campos aether et lumine vestit 
Purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norunt." 

That Elysium of the classic past was crowded 
with gods and heroes, with orators and poets 
and historians. Its monuments of art and liter- 
ature were supereminent in beauty and in pas- 
sion; throbbing with lyric life, pulsing with 
music, resonant with song, resplendent ^vith 
imagined light and colour. Its records un- 
rolled majestic pageants of rising and falling 
empires, of glorious actions and heroic lives. 
In this congenial atmosphere their own resus- 
citated senses seemed to thrive. Their frost- 
bound perceptions thavv^ed, their cramped limbs 
began to move with new delight in living. The 
natural man, no longer cowed by the conviction 
of his sinfulness, stood up and faced the heav- 
ens. The carnal appetites were dignified by 
contact with ideal loveliness and tragic destiny. 
This, I imagine, was the attitude of mind 
which resulted in Humanism, We are wont to 
talk about the "Revival of Learning." But 

%0 



let us not forget the sense of inebriation, the 
revel and the riot, which attended that irrup- 
tion of mediseval scholars into the Elysium of 
the past. Let us realise the intense joy with 
which they discovered that this Elysium was no 
dream, but concrete fact, was in sober earnest 
the truth of what men had been, might again 
be, ought to be, were made to be. In their first 
exultation, they dubbed their acquisitions by 
the significant title of ''Humaniora" or the 
things which properly belong to man, as dis- 
tinguished from things with which the Church 
and scholasticism defrauded and perplexed his 
reason. 

Petrarch is the hero of this stage. He com- 
bined a personality no less defined and even 
more self-conscious than Dante's, with the 
curiosity of the New Spirit. His book of 
poems upon Laura is the subtle analysis of a 
highly sensitive soul. His affection for the 
author of the Confessions proves him to have 
been already possessed with the ache and 
yearning of the modern temperament — '*la 
maladie de la pensee — I'amour de Fimpossible 

81 



— rautopsie psychologique de Tame." This 
was one aspect of Petrarch's genius. The 
other was a manful belief in scholarship, a per- 
ception that classic literature would furnish the 
means of spiritual rehabilitation. He was the 
first to understand that the dignity of man as a 
rational being must be re-established, not by 
combating theology, but by leaving it alone, 
and by assimilating the wisdom of the ancients. 
Petrarch approached the classics with the tact 
and sensibility which had been lacking to medi- 
aeval students. Virgil, and Ovid, and Cicero 
were for him no magicians, no heretics, and no 
mystagogues, but men of like nature with him- 
self, superior indeed in culture, yet such as he 
could comprehend, make friends with, learn 
from. Petrarch bridged the chasm of the Mid- 
dle Ages, even as Milton's Satan, when he 
made that traversable roadway across chaos. 
After him scholars freely passed into Elysium 
and returned into the world of common day. 
History was seen to be continuous, and the 
unity of the human race was demonstrated. 
Humanism, when once started by Petrarch, 

82 



rapidly pursued its course of accumulation and 
assimilation. The tale of the Revival in its 
several stages — collection of manuscripts, in- 
terpretation of texts, study of style, resuscita- 
tion of Greek learning, printing, translation, 
and so forth— has been so often told that there 
is no need to retrace it. I must pause, how- 
ever, to contemplate the mental and moral atti- 
tude of the humanists more closely. 

"We go," said Cyriac of Ancona, "to awake 
the dead." It was in that frame of mind that 
Petrarch's immediate successors entered the 
classical Elysium by the bridge which he had 
built. But the dead whom they found there 
were at once seen to be the really living. These 
scholars then came back with the firm convic- 
tion that contemporary people of importance 
— hair-splitting dialecticians, superstitious 
quacks, relic-mongers, jugglers with holy ves- 
sels, salesmen of absolutions — were the dead or 
dying. Defunct and obsolete for them were 
Fathers of the Church, doctors seraphic and 
angelic, doctors of laws, saints of silly miracles, 
childish worshippers at shrines, sleek, cunning 

83 



Levites in the tabernacle. Alive and luminous 
with ever-during glory rose the poets and 
philosophers, the orators and statesmen, the 
artists and law-givers, of the ancient world. 
These worthies and heroes had either lived be- 
fore Christ or had ignored the shining of his 
light. Therefore Dante, although he described 
them as — 

"Genti con occhi tardi e gravi 
Di grande autorita ne* lor sembianti" — 

placed them, without the smallest sense of the 
injustice and absurdity of their damnation, 
upon the first circle of Hell, within earshot of 
the wailings and the shriekings which eternally 
rise from its torture-chambers. The humanists 
having adopted these same noble personages as 
their sole guides in the lore of living, as the 
only teachers of true wisdom, could not main- 
tain the orthodox attitude of reprobation. Yet 
scholarship was too engrossed with its own 
labour of discovery to open a crusade against 
Church practices or dogmas. Why waste valu- 
able time in squabbles with ignorant authority 
when that wonderful region, the dreamland of 

34 



a reality more real, a truth more true than daily 
life, awaited exploration? In this way pagan- 
ism filtered tacitly but surely, like an elixir of 
fresh mountain air, or like a miasma from foul 
marshes — according to the point of view one 
takes of the matter — into the intellectual con- 
stitution of humanism. The significance of 
this will appear at a later point of our inquiry. 
At present it is enough to remark that the curi- 
osity of the New Spirit early generated 
Rationalism, 

We cannot connect the rapid growth of the 
fine arts in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 
turies immediately with the Revival of Learn- 
ing. But we can show that the arts, like learn- 
ing, derived energy from the curiosity of self- 
conscious personalities, aroused to vivid inter- 
est in the world around them. As Petrarch 
revealed a new insight into literature, so Giotto 
and Nicolo Pisano displayed a sense of natural 
beauty, a feeling for form and composition, a 
power over dramatic action and emotional ex- 
pression, which had been unknown in the Mid- 
dle Ages. The painters and the sculptors of 

35 



the early Renaissance looked on the world 
around them with eyes from which the scales 
of centuries had fallen. They soon began to 
particularize, each individual forming his man- 
ner, selecting what pleased or touched him 
most in nature, aiming solely at the best and 
truest interpretation. This led to profound 
study of details, careful anatomy and drawing 
of the human nude, elaborate experiments in 
perspective, subtle attempts to render atmo- 
sphere, exquisite sympathy with plant-struc- 
ture, birds, beasts, flowers, and shells. At first 
the artists served the Church. Giotto and his 
school covered the cathedrals of Italy with 
Bible histories, legends of the saints, allegories 
relating to ecclesiastical dogma. But when 
the Revival of Learning filled men's minds 
with classical mythology and story, the artists 
turned their attention with fresh delight and 
with no less scrupulous sympathy to the Greek 
Pantheon and the deeds of Roman worthies. 
Art was indifferent to the spiritual nature of 
the subject, impartial in the bestowal of her 
skill and pains. After this fashion sculpture 

36 



and painting assisted Humanism, by exhibit- 
ing through plastic form and colour the unity 
of the spirit of man under both Christian and 
pagan aspects. St. Sebastian might have been 
a Christian martyr, and Antinous the deified 
mignon of a pagan emperor ; but art only saw 
their common qualities of beauty, convenient 
opportunities for depicting naked young men 
in the prime of life. A dead Christ and a liv- 
ing Hercules had equal merit if the torso was 
well modelled. Female charm shone forth in 
St. Lucy and the Magdalene as agreeably as in 
Aphrodite and the Graces. Moreover, in addi- 
tion to this reduction of both pagan and 
Christian subject-matter to a common assthet- 
ical denominator, the Rne arts contributed what 
may be called Naturalism to the characteris- 
tics of the New Spirit. Naturalism was the 
product of artistic curiosity, as Rationalism 
had been the product of the humanistic curios- 
ity. 

This is a point of some importance. 
Sculptors and painters worked in complete 
independence. So long as they did not outrage 

37 



religious feeling and moral decency too 
brutally, they were free to follow their own 
predilections. Like Signorelli, they might 
cover the arabesques of Heaven and Hell with 
male and female nudities displayed in gro- 
tesque and fantastic postures. Like Filarete, 
they might mould the Rape of Ganymede upon 
the bronze gates of St. Peter's. Their duty 
was to succeed in beautiful presentation and 
expression. In order to arrive at this result 
they laboured v> ith enthusiasm at the technique 
of their crafts, they studied natural objects 
minutely, and made themselves familiar with 
every form of fact. Naturalism, as liberated 
by artistic practice, proved later on of great 
service to the physical sciences. It stimulated 
habits of close observation, bred a craving after 
exact knowledge, freed the mind from preju- 
dices regarding the uncleanliness or repulsive- 
ness of anything which could be found in 
nature. Some of the earliest mathematicians, 
anatomists, physiologists, in Italy were artists. 
In Leo Battista Alberti, in Leonardo da Vinci, 
in Michelangelo Buonarotti, we have men who 

38 



combined the subtlest sensibility to carnal 
beauty, the most thorough command of form 
and colour, with profound practical science 
and with those prophetical indagations which 
contain the germs of luminous discovery. 
[Naturalism, again, is the direct opposite of 
mysticism. Insofar as mediseval Christianity 
was mystical, the figurative and naturalistic 
representation of its dogmas inflicted serious 
injury upon the fabric of the creed. The 
Creator did not gain in dignity by being repre- 
sented as an old man v/ith a hoary beard. The 
Trinity v/as reduced to the same level as the 
Pope, when it appeared as a robed pontiff with 
a triple crown; it became ridiculous under the 
aspect of an old man, a white dove, and a cruci- 
fix. Moreover, people soon perceived that 
Pagan mythology was not only more enticing 
and attractive, but also more adapted to plastic 
presentation, than the mythology of the 
Christian faith. Gods and heroes, nymphs and 
Graces, suited the sensuousness of arts which 
aimed at corporeal loveliness, far better than 
emaciated saints, disgusting martyrdoms, 

39 



crucifixions, and infernal torments. Silent and 
unperceived, art, by its naturalism, sapped 
orthodoxy much in the same way as scholar- 
ship, by its rationalism, was serving the same 
purpose. 

Naturalism did not confine its influence to 
the arts of form and colour. It very early 
invaded literature, especially fiction, poetry, 
and narrative. Boccaccio, like his master, 
Petrarch, was both a humanist and a poet of 
marked individuality. In his former capacity 
he gave a start to the study of Greek, and did 
yeoman's service by making miscellaneous 
compilations and collections from the classics. 
In poetry he ranks as the first and one of the 
greatest of modern naturalists. This is evi- 
dent, not only in the Decameron^ but also in the 
versified romances which he composed so flu- 
ently. Boccaccio bequeathed to Italy a pecu- 
liar type of literature, in close relation to the 
plastic arts, which, after passing through the 
hands of Sannazaro, Pulci, De Medici, Poli- 
ziano, Boiardo, Bandello, reached its climax in 
Ariosto. The enormous influence exercised by 

40 



this great writer over posterity was not due to 
the commanding grandeur of his genius, but 
to the fact that naturalism formed an essential 
ingredient of the New Spirit. Boccaccio, as 
novelist, remained unrivalled; but, as poet, he 
fell below the level of Poliziano and Boiardo. 
It was his merit to have imported crude, un- 
abashed, and jocund naturalism into the sphere 
of monumental literature. 

The New Spirit advanced under retarding 
influences of Catholicity and mediasval dul- 
ness. These drawbacks, however, were not so 
formidable as might appear. Neither scholar- 
ship nor art assumed a position of direct antag- 
onism to Christianity; and though they were 
creating an intellectual atmosphere in which 
orthodoxy could not hope to survive and thrive, 
their first aspect seemed both innocent and 
agreeable. The Church had become secular 
and mundane, indifferent to her real essence 
and vocation, merged in diplomacies and com- 
promises. Unaware of any special danger, 
her most enhghtened sons, men dedicated to 
study by the fact of their profession, felt the 

41 



gust of the new intellectual life abroad in 
Europe. Her chiefs, the popes and cardinals, 
regarded scholarship as an adornment of their 
social culture, and art as a convenient hand- 
maid of their faith. The one was welcomed in 
the palace and the council chamber, the other 
in the cathedral and the oratory. Humanism, 
in particular, proved at the outset a substantial 
ally against astrologers, Averrhoists, wrangl- 
ing scholastics, sordid monks, and all the 
fanatical free-lances who are obnoxious to 
privileged establishments. The fabric of the 
Church appeared so solid, humanism so en- 
lightened, art so pious, that Catholicity felt 
justified in swimming with the tide. She 
thought, and not unreasonably thought, that 
she might acclimatise the New Spirit and 
secure it for her service, as she had annexed the 
fervent charity of Francis, the persecuting 
zeal of Dominic. Owing to the easy-going 
temper of the Roman Curia, and to the indif- 
ference of scholarship for theological disputes, 
the New Spirit obtained a century of quiet 
working at the very centre of European life. 

42 



When the Great Schism came to an end, 
and the Popes returned to reign in Rome, the 
triumph of humanism was secured. The first 
pontiff of this new regime, Nicholas V., was a 
distinguished scholar, derived in a direct Ime 
from Petrarch. The next pontiff of impor- 
tance, Pius II., was a versatile diplomatist and 
man of letters, somewhat akin to Leo Battista 
Alberti in temperament, sensitive at all points 
to the charms of nature and of art, enamoured 
with the delicacies and ingenuities of human- 
istic rhetoric. These men gave tone to the 
Papacy, when Rome once more became a 
capital, and when the Holy See entered into 
political relations on .a common footing with 
the despots and repubhcs of Italy. 

The whole peninsula at this period (1447- 
1464) had been saturated with humanism. 
Scholars educated in the lecture-rooms of 
Filelfo and Guarino held office as chancellors, 
secretaries, envoys, orators on state occasions, 
protonotaries, court-chamberlains. The new 
learning was the passport for young men of 
ability into all places of secular and ecclesi- 

43 



astical importance. No one regarded their 
morality, theii' orthodoxy, their private opin- 
ions or their personal conduct. It was sufficient 
if they commanded the main things needful at 
the moment: the tongue of the fluent rhetori- 
cian, the pen of the ready writer, the memory 
of the student stocked with antique erudition. 
We marvel at the rapidity with which this 
modern type of culture supplanted mediaeval- 
ism. But the rapidity w^hich moves our wonder 
is the proof of healthy and organic growth. 
One eminent family at Florence contributed in 
no small measure to the triumph of the New 
Spirit. The Medici, through four generations, 
beginning with Cosimo Pater Patriae, passing 
through Lorenzo the Magnificent and Leo X., 
culminating in Clement VII., sustained the 
cause of humanism and of art. Nor did they 
stand alone. The lords of Milan and Rimini, 
the kings of Naples, the dukes of Ferrara and 
Urbino, all the minor potentates in every city- 
state, vied wdth one another in conforming to 
this novel type of civility. Italians of all 
regions and all political diversities found them- 

M 



selves confederated by common sympathy with 
the New Spirit. 

Meanwhile, Christianity continued to be 
the official religion of the nation. But the tem- 
per of the new civility was pagan. Sensuous 
in art, sceptical in study, it rejected asceticism 
and derided dogma. "Let us enjoy the Papacy 
now that we have got it," said one Pope. "If 
we believe nothing ourselves, there is no reason 
why we should interfere with believers," said 
another. "How much hath that lie of Christ 
profited the world," is a third of these Papal 
utterances. And those who acted more than 
they spoke — Popes like Sixtus IV. and Alex- 
ander VI. — presented a glaring spectacle of 
Antichrist enthroned upon St. Peter's chair. 
If such were the shepherds, judge what were 
the flocks! 

The paganism of the Italian Renaissance, 
of which so much has been said, and justly, was 
a very real thing. Humanism and art, by 
returning to Greek and Roman ideals of 
thought and conduct, and by emphasising the 
sensuous elements of life, created a fine aesthetic 



45 



atmosphere, in which the emancipated person- 
ality of the modern men moved freely, feeling 
at liberty to sport with natural inclinations. 
Vices and passions had been frequent enough, 
and forcible enough, in the mediasval period; 
but then they were recognized as sins and con- 
tradictions of the dominant ideal. Now they 
assumed forms of elegance and beauty, claim- 
ing condonation on the score of polite culture. 
The scepticism inherent in men who criticised 
Christianity from the standpoint of antique 
manners, terminated in a not repulsive cynic- 
ism. Society strove to be epicurean, but did 
not quite succeed, for the barbarian and the 
ascetic had not been eradicated. 

The paganism of the Renaissance might be 
described as moral and religious indifference, 
an attitude of not ungenial toleration towards 
believers and unbelievers, saints and sinners. 
In like manner the rationalism of the Renais- 
sance was intellectual indiiterence, interest in 
thoughts without regard for the sources whence 
they came or the particular shade of opinion 
they denoted. The naturalism of the Renais- 

46 



sance was sensuous indifference, an attitude of 
sympathetic observation toward everything in 
nature, without false shame or loathing, an 
openness of sensibihty to all impressions. These 
three factors were needed for the formation of 
the modern analytical spirit, which is impartial 
in judgment, unprejudiced for or against reli- 
gious and ethical codes, reckless as to the 
results of its method, indifferent as to the 
moral or sesthetical qualities of the thing to be 
examined. To this point, then, had the union 
of personality with cm'iosit}^ or mental appe- 
tite brought the Italians in the golden age, as 
it is absurdly called, of Leo X. 

The Revival of Learning was accom- 
plished. That is to say, the Greek and Latin 
authors which we now possess, had, with a very 
few exceptions, been printed, commented and 
translated. During the course of this process, 
a new organ was added to the modern mind, 
which had been completely lacking in the Mid- 
dle Ages. The elucidation of ancient authors, 
the settlement of texts, and the comparison of 
manuscripts, produced Criticism, Generated 

47 



in the pagan milieu of the earher Renaissance, 
criticism naturally attacked the superstitions 
and the vices of the clergy. But in Italy this 
was done with good humour by humanists like 
Poggio and novelists like Bandello. They did 
not mean mischief, and aimed at no revolution 
in the Church. The situation became more 
delicate when Christian dogma, ecclesiastical 
tradition, the principles of private and public 
ethics, the Bibhcal cosmology, the philosophy 
of Aquinas, were subjected in turn to destruct- 
ive analysis. It was at the Court of Naples, 
during the warfare carried on between the 
House of Aragon and the Holy See, that 
humanism first showed its teeth in earnest. 
Lorenzo Valla attacked the temporahties of 
Rome by his treatise on "The erroneously be- 
lieved and falsely fabricated Donation of Con- 
stantine.'* The same critic declared the epistle 
of Christ to Abgarus a forgery, sneered at the 
bad Latin of the Vulgate, and denied the 
authenticity of the Apostles' creed. Machia- 
veUi, working in another region, openly pro- 
claimed that the monastic virtues of humility 

48 



and obedience sapped virility and character. 
He proved the Papacy to have been the source 
of moral and political weakness to Italy. He 
studied history from a coldly analytical and 
positive point of view, treating mankind as a 
political community, governed by ability and 
might, without reference to a provident Deity. 
Copernicus, in the field of astronomy, 
dethroned Ptolemy, and made the sun the cen- 
tre of our system. Pomponazzo called the 
immortality of the soul in question. Telesio 
pronounced that interrogation of Nature is 
the only basis for a ^ound philosophy. On all 
sides, therefore, criticism initiated a revolt 
against authority. That independent and self- 
conscious personality, which formed the vital 
principle of the Renaissance movement, had 
arrived at asserting the right of private judg- 
ment. Fortified by curiosity, rationalism, 
naturalism, the critical reason now rejected 
everything which could not be proved by posi- 
tive methods of analysis. In other words, 
Modern Science had been born. 

Down to the end of Leo X.'s reign, this 

49 



advance of criticism caused little uneasiness. 
Society, including the Church, was imbued 
with humanistic scepticism and aesthetic sensu- 
ousness. The gay and glittering life of the 
Renaissance dazzled the eyes of all men. What 
if professors in dark corners blurted out un- 
comfortable truths? The weighty bearings 
of their utterances were not perceived. 
Scandals raised by Valla's heresy and Pom- 
ponazzo's materialism disappeared before the 
dubious assertion that, while they speculated 
as philosophers, they believed as Christians. 
This convenient sophistry cloaked a multitude 
of sins. The Copernican hypothesis was 
laughed at as an incredible theory started by a 
visionary barbarian from the shores of the 
Baltic. Telesio passed for a harmless natural 
philosopher, a kind of botanist or conchologist. 
No one noticed the significance of the discovery 
of America, the exploration of the globe, the 
proof of the Antipodes. It sufficed in Lateran 
Councils to confirm the views of the mediaeval 
Church upon disputed topics. This was the 
sop which a sceptical Pope threw to ecclesias- 

50 



tics alarmed by the steady spread of neological 
opinions. 

It is well to pause here for a moment and 
review the position which the New Spirit had 
secured in Italy. In literature, art and specu- 
lation, it enjoyed an almost untrammelled in- 
tellectual liberty. But the temper of the race 
did not favour searching theological discus- 
sions, and the time was not quite ripe for an 
outburst of revolutionary metaphysic. The 
humanists were too indifferent and easy-going 
— ^lapped in their Elysium of antiquity. They 
aimed at culture more than the discovery of 
truth. Their paganism wore a self-indulgent 
and immoral aspect. They sneered at 
Christianity. In their cynicism they did not 
care for religion, and were well contented to 
leave a Church alone, which so conveniently 
fostered their tastes and condoned their vices. 
Moreover, we must not forget that we are trac- 
ing the history of a hybrid. The blending of 
present with past, of pagan with Christian, of 
ancient with modern, produced an inevitable 
confusion in men's minds. Thought could not 

51 



run quite clear from the sediment of decaying 
mysticism, dogmatism, authority. It hardly 
knew the nature of its own audacity imtil the 
apparition of Giordano Bruno. Art was ham- 
pered and indecisive between Olympus and 
Calvary, literature clogged by mediaeval 
reminiscences and scholastic pedantry. The 
New Spirit, although so vigorous, still re- 
mained a perplexed and seeking force — per- 
plexed by opposing currents of influence, cum- 
bered by erudition, seeking adjustments, grop- 
ing after exits. The like is true of society and 
individuals. We have only to study the 
biographies of typical personages, a Michel- 
angelo, a Cellini, a Roderigo Borgia, in order 
to perceive that the same contradictions existed 
in life as in the genius of the age. What makes 
the Renaissance so fascinating and so difBcult 
to handle is the fact of its hybridism. 

But now the tide began to take a serious 
turn. Himianism had been transplanted be- 
yond the Alps. Criticism armed the scholars 
of Germany with artillery far more efficient 
than those light guns of the Italian sceptics. 

52 



The Germans believed in Christianity, and 
clung to their religion. Horrified by the 
paganism of the South, indignant at the 
cynical hypocrisy of infidel Popes and pre- 
lates, irritated beyond measure by the sale of 
indulgences for the building of a pompous 
temple, the people stirred in revolt against 
Rome. Their leading humanists applied the 
method of critical analysis to the Bible, not 
with the intention of sneering Christianity 
away, but of discovering what was the true 
essence of creed which had been overgrown — 
like Glaucus in the myth of Plato — ^by weeds 
and barnacles at the bottom of that dead sea 
of ecclesiastical corruption. The Reformation 
attacked the authority of popes and councils; 
disputed the traditional dogmas of orthodoxy; 
proclaimed the fullest liberty of private judg- 
ment; denounced monasticism and the celi- 
bacy of the clergy as immoral and unscriptural ; 
and, what was worse, menaced the very fabric 
of the Cathohc Church, its temporalities, its 
hierarchy, its supremacy over souls. 

The Reformation must be regarded as the 

53 



product of that intellectual emancipation which 
started with the curiosity of Petrarch and per- 
formed the stages I have already described in 
Italy. Only this new force now animated a 
race which had no natural bias for the fine arts 
and letters, which disliked pagan licence, and 
was not ready to abandon Christian doctrine. 
Sceptical and revolutionary at its outset, the 
German Reformation speedily revealed the in- 
herent conservatism of its promoters. Luther, 
Zwingli, Calvin, differ as they might in minor 
details, agreed in preserving the main features 
of the Christian faith intact. For the author- 
ity of the Church they substituted the author- 
ity of the Bible. Less logical than the Italians, 
they were not conscious of the weakness of their 
own position. They did not sm-mise that their 
critical method must lead inevitably to Vol- 
taire, Renan, and the science of comparative 
theology. Luther would have been indignant 
had he been told that he was playing the part of 
pioneer to coming Comtes and Huxleys. Yet 
this was the fact, and the Church in Italy per- 
ceived it. Luterano became equivalent to 

infidel. 

54 



The Church girded herself up for a conflict 
to the death in defence of her religious creeds, 
her system of discipline, her political interests, 
her temporal power. The clash of Catholicism 
and Reformation destroyed the tranquil 
medium in which the New Spirit had been 
thriving and advancing toward maturity. Posi- 
tive, scientific, analytical, the Genius of intel- 
lectual independence and open-mindedness 
met with rancorous hostility in both camps. 
The Reformers of Wittenberg and Zurich and 
Geneva were at bottom no less opposed to free 
thought than were the Catholic reactionaries of 
Spain. Calvin burned Servetus fifty years 
before the Roman Inquisition burned Bruno. 
So far as Italy was concerned, the Tridentine 
Council extinguished, or, to put the case more 
exactly, drove underground the New Spirit. 
In Germany the Thirty Years' War annihi- 
lated civilisation. 

It would be sentimental to deplore the 
waste of time, of energy, of human life, which 
this conflict between Reform and Catholic re- 
action involved for Europe. Considering the 

55 



different moral and intellectual temperaments 
of North and South, the different stages of 
culture attained by Germany and Italy, the 
struggle was inevitable. Nor did the New 
Spirit lose in the end by the retardation of its 
development. Had it retained the complexion 
it assumed in Italy during the Renaissance, 
we should have been ethically poorer and voli- 
tionally weaker. Imagine a seventeenth- 
century Prussia ruled in tastes and opinions by 
humanists like Filelfo and poets like the 
author of Hermaphroditus! Paganism, barely 
tolerable in Naples, must have been repulsive 
when communicated to the coarse and 
eminently inartistic Borussian temperament. 
Time, moreover, was needed to leaven the 
heterogeneous masses of the Occidental nations 
with a common culture. This has been done 
by scholarship, and the steady, if slow, advance 
of scientific thought. The destinies of science 
were, from the first, secure. And are we not 
aware that Virtus ^uh ponder e crescit? 

At the commencement of the Catholic re- 
action some of the calmest and wisest spirits, 

56 



who had imbibed the new philosophy of 
thought, but who were incapable of siding with 
the Reformers— who had, in fact, gauged the 
inherent finality and vulgarity of Protestant 
Dissent in any shape — ^became what I have 
elsewhere called religious Whigs. The atti- 
tude of men like Contarini, More, Erasmus, 
Sarpi, has great interest for the psychologist; 
and a fascinating book remains to be written 
upon this group of thinkers. They dreamed 
that the New Spirit might purge itself of 
Paganism, that Catholicism might cast off its 
superstitions and corruptions, that Reform 
might prove accommodating upon such com- 
parative trifles as the nature of the eucharist 
and salvation by faith. They imagined an 
ideal Europe, in which rehgion and science 
should coexist, where men should be rational 
in thought and pious in conduct. But the very 
conditions of the case rendered this solution of 
the difficulty impossible. 

That the New Spirit would prove ultimately 
intransigeant, and irreconcilable to Christian 
theology, was clearly demonstrated by its last 

57 



and noblest representative in Italy. Bruno's 
life was cut short at the comparatively early 
age of forty-four, yet he left behind him 
voluminous writings, from which an adequate 
idea may be formed of his philosophy. As a 
personality, endowed with singular courage 
and remarkable independence, Bruno towers 
eminent among the powerful characters of that 
age so rich in individualities. The two cur- 
rents of Renaissance curiosity, which had pro- 
duced criticism and naturalism, met and 
blended in his intellect. As a thinker, his chief 
merit was to have perceived the true bearings 
of the Copernican discovery. He saw that the 
substitution of a heliocentric for the former 
geocentric theory of our system destroyed at 
one blow large portions of the Christian myth- 
ology. But more than this. Copernicus had 
failed to draw the logical conclusions of his own 
hypothesis. For him, as for the elder physic- 
ists, there remained a sphere of fixed stars 
enclosing the world perceived by our senses 
within walls of crystal. Bruno asserted the 
existence of numberless worlds in space illim- 

58 



itable. Bolder than his teacher, and nearer to 
the truth, he passed far beyond the flaming 
ramparts of the universe, denied that there 
were any walls, and proclaimed the infinity of 
space. Space, he thought, is filled with ether, 
in which an infinite number of solar systems 
resembling our own, composed of similar mate- 
rials, and inhabited by countless living crea- 
tures, move with freedom. Not a single atom 
in this stupendous complex can be lost or un- 
accounted for. There is no such thing as birth 
or death, as generation or dissolution, but only 
a continual passage of the infinite and homo- 
geneous substance through successive phases 
of finite differentiated existence. This general 
conception of the universe, which coincides with 
that accepted at the present time by men of 
science, led Bruno to speculations involving a 
theory of evolutionary development, and to 
what would now be called the conservation of 
energy. Rejecting as untenable the dualism 
of mind and matter, he argued, from the pres- 
ence of the intellect in man, and from the uni- 
versality of form in all phenomena, that the 

59 



essence of the whole can best be grasped by our 
imagination under the analogy of life and 
spirit. 

This brief summary of Bruno's system 
makes it evident to what a large extent he anti- 
cipated not only the philosophies of Descartes, 
Spinoza, Leibnitz, Hegel, but also the most 
recent conclusions of natural science. In his 
treatment of theology and ethics, he was no less 
original and prophetic. He solved the prob- 
lem of evil by defining it to be a relative con- 
dition of imperfect development, not evil in 
itself, but evil to our partial vision. He denied 
that any Paradise or Golden Age preceded 
human history. In his opinion, the fall of 
man from a primal state of innocence and hap- 
piness is an absurdity in itself, contradicting 
all we know about the laws of growth. In 
morals he inclined toward determinism. Pass- 
ing to theology in the strict sense of that term, 
he sketched in outline the comparative study 
of religions. It is obvious that he regarded no 
one creed as final, no sacred book as exclus- 
ively inspired, no single race as chosen, no 

60 i , 



teacher or founder of a faith as specially divine, 
no Church as privileged with salvation. 

To this point had the New Spirit advanced 
when outraged Catholicism, very naturally, 
logically, and consistently with the instinct of 
self-preservation, burned Bruno in 1600. 

The synthesis of criticism and naturalism, 
which took this form with Bruno, a form usu- 
ally described as idealism, though Bruno's own 
aim was to arrive at a probable conception of 
the imiverse as it actually exists, assumed a 
different aspect in another group of Italian 
thinkers, Pomponazzo, Telesio, Gahleo, with 
the physicists, anatomists, and physiologists of 
Padua. Their line led up to Bacon, to induct- 
ive and experimental science. 

It was my business in the present essay to 
analyse the main characteristics of the New 
Spirit in the Italian Renaissance. The his- 
tory of Rationalism, or Naturalism, or Posi- 
tive Philosophy during the last three centuries, 
and the sustained conflict of the New Spirit 
with dogmatic theology, is a subject too vast 
to be undertaken here. What the issue of that 



61 



conflict in the future will be is, I think, already 
certain. The struggle may continue, perhaps, 
for centuries, until the New Spirit shall have 
thoroughly imbued the modern mind, and 
Christianity be gradually purged of all that is 
decayed or obsolescent in its creed, retaining 
only that ethic which we owe to it, and which, 
though capable of being raised to higher stages, 
will remain the indestructible possession of the 
race. 



62 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 



ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 

It is not our purpose to dwell upon the 
biography of Mr. Clough, but rather to exam- 
ine his works, and to show in what their real 
and vital excellence consists. Yet in order to 
understand these works, and to explain away 
some misconceptions which have arisen as to 
the alleged "wasted genius," "baffled intellect," 
"unfulfilled purpose," and "disappointed life" 
of Mr. Clough, which many of his critics bitter- 
ly deplore, we may preface our review of his 
poems by a short notice of this biography. His 
life, which w^as in no sense of the word an event- 
ful one, falls naturally into three periods. The 
first embraces his childhood in America; his 
education at Rugby, under Dr. Arnold,' by con- 
tact with whose character his own singularly 
conscientious tone of mind was strengthened to 
an almost morbid degree; and his Oxford 

65 



career. Clough entered upon his life at Ox- 
ford during the great Tractarian movement; 
and at an early period of his course he fell 
under the influence of Ward, the celebrated 
convert to Romanism. The struggles of this 
time seem to have entirely shaken his mind 
upon the most fundamental points of religious 
belief, and to have caused in him a painful and 
perturbed state of feeling, from which he was 
long in recovering. The immediate result of 
this disturbance appears to have been that he 
failed to take a first-class in the final examina- 
tions, gi-eatly to the surprise and disappoint- 
ment of his friends, and especially of Dr. 
Arnold, who expected the highest things from 
him. Gradually, however, he wore off this de- 
pression, and decided upon following up his 
career at Oxford. In pursuance of this resolve, 
he sought and obtained a fellowship at Oriel, 
and threw himself with energy into the educa- 
tional work of his college for some years. But 
doubts as to the honesty of his remaining in this 
position seem to have survived from his old 
state of feeling, and to have grown upon him, 

66 



until the negative conclusions to which he was 
forced made him feel obliged to resign his 
tutorship at Oriel in 1848, and his fellowship 
soon after in the same year. The magnitude 
of this sacrifice to principle can only be under- 
stood by those who are most intimately 
acquainted with his private history, and who 
know to what pecuniary difficulties he was ex- 
posed by the failure of his hitherto certain in- 
come. It is enough to state that for the rest of 
his life the making of some money became a 
paramount necessity ; and, as he was not a man 
who could mingle literary pursuits with busi- 
ness, or poetise in the intervals of harassing 
duties, his artistic productiveness was limited 
by the barest conditions of daily life. In 1849 
the second period of his life began : it embraces 
his Italian journeys, during which he com- 
posed "Amours de Voyage" and "Dipsychus;" 
his Principalship of University Hall; and his 
residence in America. In 1853 he took work in 
the Educational Department of the Privy 
Council Office, and in the following year he 
was married. This introduces the third and last 



67 



period of his life. He worked regularly at his 
official duties, and also took an active interest 
and part for several years in the labours of his 
relative, Miss Florence Nightingale. Constant 
strain of work broke down his health, and he 
was obliged to travel in the spring and sum 
m'er of 1861. In the course of this journey he 
caught a fever which ended his life at Florence 
at the age of forty-two. 

Such is the briefest outline of Clough's life. 
Its chief value is to bring out the essential point 
that the "Bothie," "Amours de Voyage," 
''Dipsychus," and "Mari Magno" — the four 
principal monuments of his poetical genius — 
were all of them composed in the course of two 
short periods of holiday and relaxation: the 
first three during the quiet time which inter- 
vened between the first and second period we 
have marked, after he had broken with Oxford 
and when he had not yet engaged in other 
work; the last, immediately before his death 
and during his last journey. The poems 
themselves bear traces of the scenes and times 
that gave them birth. The "Bothie" is a rec- 

68 



ord of Highland reading parties ; "Amours de 
Voyage" is full of Roman associations; "Dip- 
syehus" carries us to Venice; "Mari Magno" 
combines the influences of a voyage across the 
Atlantic with several touches caught from 
Pyrenean, Swiss, and Greek scenery. In so 
true a sense were Clough's poems the product 
of his life, and so clearly were the powers of his 
genius limited, not by their own feebleness or 
by the wasting action of a morbid intellect, but 
by the lack of time and opportunity for fuller 
and more studied compositions. Indeed, we 
believe that none but those who judge Clough's 
life and writings by the lowest standard will 
maintain that his work was insufficient. On the 
contrary, if we regard the quality rather than 
the quantity of literary production, our feeling 
will be surprise at the mere amount of his 
poetry, especially if we reflect upon the nature 
of the topics which he handled, the conscien- 
tious scrupulosity of his nature, both as a poet 
and as a man, and the various distractions of 
his life. Clough had nothing of the self-con- 
scious artist or of theordmarylitterateur about 

69 



him. His poems are not flashes on the surface, 
occasional ]3ieces, or set compositions upon 
given themes; but the very pith and marrow 
of a deeply-thinking, deeply-feeling soul — ^the 
most heartfelt utterances of one who sought to 
speak out what was in him in the fewest and the 
simplest words. His horror of artificial lan- 
guage was often carried to excess. His hatred 
of affectation betrayed him into baldness. But 
one thing we uislj be sure to find in him — sin- 
cerity and sense. 

Those, again, who can divest themselves of 
social and religious prejudices, and who are 
strong enough to breathe the fine, rare atmos- 
phere of thought in which he moved, will 
acknowledge that it was not he who was irre- 
ligious, but that this reproach might rather be 
cast on those of us who blind our eyes, and 
palter with our conscience, and endeavor to im- 
pose our intellectual forms and fancies upon 
God. Clough happened to live during a period 
of transition in the history of human thought, 
when it was impossible for a thinking man to 
avoid problems by their very nature irresoluble 

70 



in one lifetime. Loving truth for its own sake, 
he laid himself open with singular purity and 
candour of mind to all the onward moving 
forces in the world around him. He did not try- 
to make things other than he found them. He 
refused to tamper with his conscience for the 
sake of repose in the Romish, or of distinction 
in the English Church ; nor yet w as he inclined 
to buy freedom at the price of irreligion. Some 
natures are capable of these courses. Truth is 
not all-important to them; they acquiesce in 
traditional methods of holiness, and in the re- 
spectabilities of time-hallowed creeds. But 
Clough was by no means one of this sort. Man- 
fully and boldly he admitted all the difficulties 
that occurred to his mind, faced them, scru- 
tinized them, and maintained in spite of them 
an invincible confidence in the moral supremacy 
of good, and in the relation of his own soul to 
God. He had the strength to cast off much that 
was dear and honoured in his earliest beliefs, 
and to fling himself upon a sea of anxious ques- 
tioning. 

71 



Determined to be free and independent, he 
resigned the valuable post he held as tutor and 
fellow of Oriel. And in all these things he 
triumphed : for no one gained a purer or keener 
insight into the essence, as distinguished from 
the forms, of religion and morality; no one 
grasped abstract truths more firmly; no one 
possessed a fuller humanity, or higher facul- 
ties of helping and sympathising with his fel- 
low-men. It was the reality of his religion, its 
perfect simplicity, its comprehensiveness and 
spirituality, which made it unintelligible to 
men of duller intellects and less sensitively 
scrupulous consciences. They required some- 
thing more definite than he could give them, 
something more rough and ready, more fitted 
for immediate use. They did not care if part of 
the truth were sacrificed so long as they had 
solid dogmas to repose upon, and comfortable 
hopes to cling to. But Clough dreaded every- 
thing like "adding up too soon" and incomplete 
conclusions. The insight which most men are 
impatient to exercise at the outset of life, he 
hoped might possibly be granted to him at its 

72 



end, or, if not then, in after stages of existence. 
The chief value of Clough's religious 
poetry appears to consist in this — that he sym- 
pathised at a very early period with the move- 
ment that is unquestionably going on towards 
the simplification and purification of belief, 
and that he gave an artistic expression to the 
thoughts of earnest seekers and questioners in 
the field of faith. In doing so he did not inno- 
vate, or ruthlessly destroy, or sentimentally be- 
wail the past. He simply tried to reduce belief 
to its original and spiritual purity — to lead 
men back to the God that is within them, wit- 
nessed by their consciences and by the history 
of the human race. The primal religious in- 
stincts of mankind are apt in the course of cen- 
turies to gather round them metaphysical 
husks, which are partly protective of the germs 
within, and partly restrictive of their true vi- 
taUty. Times arrive at which these outward 
shells are felt to have become too hard and 
narrow. They must then be broken through 
in order to free the kernels that lie within 
them. The most clear-sighted men at such 

73 



periods try to discriminate between what is 
essential and what is unimportant in religion; 
but the majority cling always to the human 
and material rubbish with which it is clogged, 
as if it were the very living and life-giving 
divine truth. We might use Plato's simile, and 
compare the present condition of the Christian 
faith, as contrasted with the teaching of its 
gi'eat Founder, to the Glaucus of the deep, 
who rises overgrown with weeds and shells 
from the ocean, where he has been hidden. To 
pull away these weeds, and to restore the god- 
like form to its own likeness, is the desire of 
all thoughtful men whose minds have been 
directed to religious questions, and who have 
not bound themselves to support the existing 
order of things, or undertaken for their own 
interests to solidify the prejudices of the mass. 
Christ himself, by his answers to the questions 
of the Jews, taught us the principle of return- 
ing to simplicity in religious beliefs. He also, 
by his example, justified us in assuming that 
the Gos^jel is not stationary, but progressive; 
that we may come to know more of God than 

74 



we knew centuries ago; and that the human 
race, by extending its intelligence, extends its 
spiritual insight. It is from this point of view 
that Clough approaches topics of religious 
beHef and Biblical inquiry. 

"My own feeling," he says, "certainly does not go 
along with Coleridge, in attributing any special virtue to 
the facts of the Gospel history. They have happened, and 
have produced what we know, have transformed the civili- 
sation of Greece and Rome and the barbarism of Gaul and 
Germany into Christendom. But I cannot feel sure that 
a man may not have all that is important in Christianity, 
even if he does not so much as know that Jesus of Naz- 
areth existed. And I do not think that doubts respecting 
the facts related in the Gospels need give us much trouble. 
Believing that in one way or other the thing is of God, 
we shall in the end perhaps know in what way, and how 
far it was so. Trust in God's justice and love, and belief 
in his commands as written in our conscience, stand un- 
shaken, though Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or even 
St. Paul, were to fall." 

Again he says, with the same confidence in 
spiritual truth which is the essence of belief 
in God: — 

"It is far nobler to teach people to do what is good, 
because it is good simply, than for the sake of any future 
reward. It is, I dare say, difficult to keep up an equal 

75 



religious feeling at present, but it is not impossible, and 
is necessary. Besides, if we die and come to nothing, it 
does not therefore follow that life and goodness will cease 
to be in earth and heaven." 

This thought is further expressed in a frag- 
ment of verse: — 

"It fortifies my soul to know 
That, though I perish. Truth is so: 
That, howsoe'er I stray and range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall." 

The power and dignity of this repose on 
what is great and good, this total unselfishness 
and confidence in the Unseen, belong to the 
highest sphere of religious faith. But it is not 
the religion of the emotions so much as of the 
intellect ; and therefore it cannot be \\ddely un- 
derstood and accepted. When the hearer is bid- 
den to discard his hopes of personal reward, 
and to embrace some exalted conception of the 
divine character more remote than that of old 
Anthropomorphism — when he is informed that 
neither at Jerusalem nor on this mountain 
must he worship, and that his God is in reality 

76 



a Spirit — he begins to murmur that there is 
nothing left for him to live by, no solid and 
substantial ground to stand upon, no sufficient 
inducements to virtuous action. And the 
preacher of so abstract and refined a faith is 
stigmatised as sceptical, if no worse name be 
given him. Thus Spinoza, who by the most in- 
telligent men of this century has been repre- 
sented as a God-absorbed, if not a "God-in- 
toxicated" man, was called an Atheist for pro- 
fessing a theology, the essence of which might 
be summed up in the one proposition, that he 
loved God too much to want love back from 
Him again. And to ordinary minds he was 
Atheistical ; for in their sense of the word God 
he had no God. He had refined and abstracted 
the idea until it vanished from the sphere of 
their intelligence. 

One great quality of Clough's mind in re- 
gard to religion was its wholly undogmatic 
character. He regarded all problems with im- 
partiahty and calnmess. One of his MS S. con- 
sists of a series of arguments in which he dis- 
cusses the great question of belief. Nothing 

77 



could better illustrate his perfect openness of 
mind than this process of reasoning. It begins 
by stating the impossibility that scholars should 
not perceive "the entire uncertainty of history 
in general, and of the origin of Christianity in 
particular." In this position he coincides with 
all the fairest and profoundest thinkers of the 
century. Niebuhr, Grote, Sir Cornewall Lewis, 
Strauss, Baur, Renan, have all in their own 
departments shown the doubtfulness of early 
history, and have endeavored with more or less 
success to sift the truth from a mass of error. 
The historian of Christianity has greater dif- 
ficulties to contend with than the historians of 
Rome or Greece; for he has no corroborative 
evidence of what is narrated in the sacred 
books, and all his endeavours to bring the truth 
to light meet with furious antagonism from 
minds wedded to the old system. But, contin- 
ues Clough, it is equally impossible for a man 
who has lived and acted among men not to per- 
ceive the value of what is called Christianity. 
The more he is convinced of this, the less in- 
clined will he be ''to base it on those foundations 



78 



which, as a scholar, he feels to be unstable. 
MSS. are doubtful, records may be unau- 
thentic, criticism is feeble, historical facts must 
be left uncertain." This then is the antithesis 
with which we have to deal: on the one hand, 
the history of the origin of Christianity in- 
volves the greatest amount of uncertainty; on 
the other hand, Christianity, as a real and vital 
principle, is indispensable to the world. Mean- 
while, our own personal experience is small and 
limited; our own powers are narrow, and not 
to be relied on. "A sane and humble-minded 
man" (concludes Clough), who is disinclined 
to adopt the watchword of a party or to set up 
new views, has no alternative "but to throw 
himself upon the great Religious Tradition." 
One step is gained ; but here another difficulty 
presents itself to the thinker. "I see not," he 
continues, "how any upright and strict dealer 
with himself, how any man, not merely a slave 
to spiritual appetites, affections, and wants — 
any man of intellectual as well as moral hon- 
esty (and without the former the latter is but 
a vain thing) can dare to affirm that the nar- 

79 



rative of the four Gospels is an essential in- 
tegral part of that tradition." The words 
which we have italicised are peculiarly charac- 
teristic of Mr. Clough. He was sensitively, al- 
most Quixotically, afraid of accepting even a 
respectable and harmless creed for the sake of 
merely being comfortable. He saw that in an 
age of doubt it was a sort of self-indulgence 
to cling to the old formulas of faith, and that, 
in one sense, honest questioning was less scep- 
tical than conscious acquiescence. Pursuing 
this vein of reflection, he condemns the weak- 
ness of ignoring scientific or historic doubts 
"for the sake of the moral guidance and spirit- 
ual comfort" implied in submissive belief, or of 
"taking refuge in Romish infallibility." At the 
same time, he is eager to deny that there is 
anything great or noble or very needful in 
showing up the inconsistencies of the New 
Testament : "it is no new gospel to tell us that 
the old one is of doubtful authenticity." But 
cannot a simple-minded man steer between the 
opposite dangers of bragging Scepticism and 
Iconoclasm on the one hand, and, on the other, 

80 



of self-indulgent mysticism? "I believe that I 
may, without any such perversion of my rea- 
son, without any such mortal sin against my 
own soul, which is identical with reason, and 
against the Supreme Giver of that soul and 
reason, still abide by the real Religious Tra- 
dition." But "where," he asks, "since neither 
in rationalism nor in Rome is our refuge, where 
then shall we seek for the Religious Tradi- 
tion?" The answer to this question is the 
answer which all good men and all sincere 
thinkers are becoming more and more ready to 
accept ; it is the answer made by the Church in 
earlier days ; the answer still implied in an old 
picture which represents Aristotle and Plato 
among the Apostles of Pentecost: — "Every- 
where. But above all," he adds, "in our own 
work, in life, in action, in submission so far as 
action goes, in service, in experience, in pa- 
tience, and in confidence." Then follows a 
very significant sentence which reveals to us 
the seriousness of Clough's mind upon this 
subject, his sense of its deep mystery, his per- 
suasion that all a man's life is too little in the 



81 



search for God. "I would scarcely have any 
man dare to say that he has found it till that 
moment when death removes his power of tell- 
ing it." The answer, however, requires to be 
expanded. We must look for the Religious 
Tradition everywhere, and not expect to find 
it in Protestantism only, or in the Roman 
Church, or in Unitarianism. Take the good 
from each and all. "Whether Christ died for 
us upon the cross I cannot tell; yet I am pre- 
pared to find some spiritual truth in the doc- 
trine of the Atonement. Purgatory is not in 
the Bible; I do not therefore think it incred- 
ible." Again, we must seek it among clergy- 
men, religious people, "among all who have 
really tried to order their lives by a high stan- 
dard." Johnson, Hume, and Butler, each in 
his own way, contributes something to the 
total. Search the Scriptures, but also search 
the Laws of Menou and the Vedas, the Persian 
sacred books and Hafiz, Confucius, the Ko- 
ran, Greek and Roman literature. Homer, 
Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Tacitus, 
can tell us something. This comprehensive- 

82 



ness and liberality of soul correspond with the 
true spirit of Christianity, of Christianity 
which is universal and divine because it is truly 
human; of Christianity which speaks aUke to 
Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and 
free, which needs no better evidence than that 
which is afforded by its parallels in India, 
China, Persia, Greece — the soul of man in 
every clime and age. Nor will this compre- 
hensive creed render us less appreciative of 
Christianity itself. We may travel far and 
wide, yet not become disqualified for returning 
"to what assuredly, prima facie, does ap- 
pear to be — not indeed the religion of the ma- 
jority of mankind^ — but the religion of the 
best, so far as we can judge in past history, 
and (despite of professed infidelity) of the 
most enlightened in our own time." To cease 
to be Christians, to separate ourselves from the 
peculiar form of Christianity adopted by our 
forefathers, would be unnatural, if not impos- 
sible; for special religions seem to be adapted 
to special races. Yet we may remember that 
there are many more Buddhists than Chris- 

83 



tians in the world, and not imagine that on us 
alone God's sun has shone. Finally, "it is 
much more the apparent dispensation of things 
that we should gradually widen than that we 
should narrow and individualize our creeds. 
Why are we daily coming more and more into 
communication with each other, if it be not 
that we learn each other's knowledge, and 
combine all into one? I feel more inclined to 
put faith in the current of the river of things 
than because it runs one way to think I must 
therefore pull hard against it to go the other." 
But it is time to pass from these reflections 
on the nature of Religion to the poems in 
which Clough has embodied the fervent spirit 
of his creed. Qui lahorat, oral — is the title of 
a few stanzas in which the poet questions 
whether it be not profane to give even the most 
abstract form to God, and concludes that work 
is the truest expression of earnest prayer. A 
similar train of thought is carried out in loftier 
language in another called "The New Sinai." 
After tracing the gradual development of the 
monotheistic idea, and adverting to the cloud 

84 



and darkness which in modern times have, 
through the influence of science on the one 
hand and superstition on the other, seemed to 
gather round the throne of God, he eloquently 
and emphatically expresses his content to trust 
and wait for the hour of God's own revelation. 
This is the essence of his religion — to believe 
in the Unseen, and bravely to embrace a faith 
without sight, instead of forging an image, 
and falling down to worship it. A third poem, 
of a strictly devout character, even more sol- 
emn in expression, more full of weighty and 
condensed thought, develops the same idea: its 
first stanza may be quoted as an index to the 
whole : — 

"0 Thou, whose image in the shrine 
Of human spirits dwells divine; 
Which from that precinct once conveyed 
To be to outer day displayed, 
Doth vanish, part, and leave behind 
Mere blank and void of empty mind, 
Which wilful fancy seeks ill vain 
With casual shapes to fill again." 

It is very difficult for those who did not 
know Clough personally to gather from such 

85 



notices as we can give, how deep and fervent — 
how absolute and unshaken — were his relig- 
ious convictions. But the witnesses of his life 
are unanimous in assuring us that the princi- 
ples expressed in the poems we have quoted 
were the fixed and unvarying rules of his own 
conduct, the supporting and strengthening 
springs of his action in the world. Contrasted 
with these devotional poems are some of a 
more analytical character, which, however, 
tend to the same conclusion, that God, falsely 
figured by the world to itself in various fanci- 
ful or obsolete shapes, or else denied with in- 
solence and scorn, is yet supreme and spiritual, 
felt by those who have preserved an honest and 
untainted soul, and dreaded with blind terror 
even by those who pretend to disbelieve in him. 
Of these, two songs in "Dipsychus," "I 
dreamed a dream," and its companion, "There 
is no God the wicked saith" (published in the 
volume of collected poems), may be cited as 
specimens. An ironical tone runs through 
them, and is strangely blended with bitterness, 
gravity, and a kind of tender regret. They 

86 



ought not to be separated ; for nothing is more 
true of dough's mind than that it worked by 
thesis and antithesis, not reaching a clear syn- 
thesis, but pushing its convictions, as it were, 
to the verge of a conclusion. The poems, for 
instance, which begin, ''Old things need not 
be therefore true," "What we, when face to 
face we see," and "Say not, the struggle 
nought availeth," are in their tone almost 
timid and retrogressive when compared with 
"Easter Day"; and yet we feel that none of 
them contain the dernier mot, Clough could 
take the world's or the devil's point of view 
with wonderful force and vigor. This is clear 
throughout "Dipsychus"; but it also appears 
in a published poem, entitled, "The Latest 
Decalogue." To imagine that when he did so 
he was expressing his own view would be to 
mistake the artist's nature altogether. Yet 
some people are so dull as to do this. They 
are shocked at any one venturing to state a 
base or wicked opinion, even though his object 
be to call attention to the contrary, and by 
revealing ugliness, to lead the eye in silence to 
the contemplation of beauty. 



In Clough's works there are many stum- 
bling-blocks for such readers — none greater 
than *'Easter Day," a poem about which it is 
hard to speak, whether we regard its depth of 
meaning or its high literary excellence. Of the 
general scope of this poem it is impossible to 
give a better account than that which is pre- 
fixed to it in the volume of "Letters and Re- 
mains." There it is styled "a semi-dramatic 
expression of the contrast he (Clough) felt 
between the complete practical irreligion and 
wickedness of the life he saw going on, and 
the outward forms and ceremonies of religion 
displaying themselves at every turn. How 
can we believe, it seems to say, that "Christ is 
risen" in such a world as this? How, if it was 
so, could such sin and such misery continue 
until now? Yet if we must give up this faith, 
what sadness and what bitterness of disap- 
pointment remain for all believers who thus 
lose all that is most dear to them! And he 
abandons himself to this feeling of grief and 
hopelessness, only still vaguely clinging to the 
belief that in earth itself there may be, if no- 

68 



where else, a new refuge and a new answer to 
this sad riddle. The mood of mind which he 
depicts in such terrible colours is not to be re- 
garded as his own habitual belief. The poem 
is in no sense a statement of facts or opinions, 
but a strong expression of feeling — above all, 
the feeling of the greatness of the evil which 
is in the world." More, however, remains to 
be said. For though *'Easter Day" "is not to 
be regarded as his own habitual belief," we 
cannot but consider it to be the expression of 
a mind steeped in the disintegrating solvents 
of nineteenth-century criticism. The author 
has clearly absorbed everything that German 
commentators have to say upon the subject of 
the resurrection — nay, more, has, at least at 
one time of his life, most keenly felt the co- 
gency of their destructive arguments, and in a 
mood of bitterness provoked by human degra- 
dation has given the form of fiery language to 
the shapeless and uncertain doubts which 
crowd the minds of a beliefless generation. 
"Easter Day" is unique in the history of lit- 
erature. It is a poem fully worthy of that 

89 



name, in which a train of close and difficult 
reasoning is expressed in concise words — such 
words as might have been used by a commen- 
tator on the Gospels, yet so subtly manipu- 
lated by the poet, with such a rhythm, such 
compactness, such vitahty of emotion, as to 
attain the dignity of art by mere simplicity 
and power. 

For the sake of those who may not have 
this poem in their hands, we subjoin some ex- 
tracts. But it must be remembered that quo- 
tation in this case is akin to mutilation, and 
that the poem itself is liable to be misunder- 
stood in its incomplete form: — 

"Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I past, 
Wiih fiercer heat than flamed above my head 
My heart was hot within me; till at last 

My brain was lightened when my tongue had said — 
Christ is not risen! 
Christ is not risen, no — 
He lies and moulders low; 
Christ is not risen! 
* * * ♦ * 

"What if the women, ere the dawn was grey, 
Saw one or more great angels, as they say 
(Angels, or Him himself) ? Yet neither there, nor then, 
Nor afterwards, nor elsewhere, nor at all, 



Hath He appeared to Peter or the Ten; 

Nor, save in thunderous terror, to blind Saul; 

Save in an after Gospel and late Creed, 

He is not risen, indeed — 
Christ is not risen! 

***** 

"Is He not risen, and shall we not rise? 

Oh, we unwise! 
What did we dream, what wake we to discover? 
Ye hills, fall on us, and ye mountains, cover! 

In darkness and great gloom 
Come ere we thought it is our day of doom; 
From the cursed world, which is one tomb, 

Christ is not risen! 

"Eat, drink, and play, and think that this is bliss: 
There is no heaven but this; 

There Is no hell, 
Save earth, which serves the purpose doubly well, 

Seeing it visits still 
With equallest apportionments of ill 
Both good and bad alike, and brings to one same dust 

The unjust and the just 

With Christ, who is not risen. 

"Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved: 
Of all the creatures under heaven's wide cope 
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
And most beliefless, that had most believed. 
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; 
As of the unjust, also of the just — 
Yea, of that Just One too! 
It is the one sad Gospel that is true — 
Christ is not risen! 



91 



"Weep not beside the tomb, 
Ye women, unto whom 
He was great solace while ye tended Him; 
Ye who with napkin o'er the head 

And folds of linen round each wounded limb 

Laid out the Sacred Dead; 
And thou that bar'st Him in thy wondering womb; 
Yea, Daughters of Jerusalem, depart, 
Bind up as best ye may your own sad bleeding heart: 
Go to your homes, your living children tend, 

Your earthly spouses love; 

Set your affections not on things above, 
Which moth and rust corrupt, which quickliest come to 

end: 
Or pray, if pray ye must, and pray, if pray ye can, 
For death; since dead is He whom he deemed more than 
man, 

Who is not risen: no, — 

But lies and moulders low, — 
Who is not risen! 



'And, oh, good men of ages yet to be, 
Who shall believe because ye did not see — 

Oh, be ye warned, be wise! 

No more with pleading eyes. 

And sobs of strong desire, 

Unto the empty vacant void aspire. 
Seeking another and impossible birth 
That is not of your own, and only mother earth. 
But if there is no other life for you, 
Sit down and be content, since this must even do: 

He is not risen!" 



92 



It must not be thought that religious prob- 
lems are the only ones which occupied the 
mdnd of Mr. Clough. On the contrary, what- 
ever is important in the life of man attracted 
his eager thought, and received from him the 
same minute and scrupulous consideration. 
His large humanity was one of his most promi- 
nent qualities; nor was there anything of real 
or of serious significance, however painful, in 
the world from which he shrank. Two princi- 
pal topics beside that of religion seem to have 
been always present to his mind. One of these 
was the question of love, the other of action, 
or of work in life. We shall now proceed to 
consider his poetical treatment of both of 
these points, which, together with religion, 
form the most important subjects that a poet 
can approach. 

Passing from Clough's religious poems to 
those in which he has dealt in detail with the 
problems of human life and love, w^e may 
make the preliminary remark that here, as in 
his more abstract compositions, he is manly 
and clairvoyant — unflinching — affecting noth- 

98 



ing, and avoiding nothing which he sees to be 
true and weighty in the facts presented to his 
notice. Though minutely analytical — as, for 
instance, in "Dipsychus" and some parts of 
"Amours de Voyage" — ^he is never morbidly 
so. We feel his personality as we do that of 
all true and sincere poets; and perhaps these 
poems are a better record of that personality 
than any memoirs which could possibly be 
written. But there is nothing self-conscious 
or unhealthily introspective in this revelation of 
himself. What strikes us in these poems of 
the second class is their perfect sincerity and 
truth to life. They are like pictures painted 
from natural objects in the fair light of day- 
no Fuseli or Blake translations from a world 
of spirits and of murky gloom. Nor is this 
impression altered where the remote and un- 
common nature of his subject obliges him to 
have recourse to psychological anatomy. We 
find no "supreme moments," no passionate 
and fiery experiences in which life is lost as in 
a furnace glow, either in his philosophy or his 
art. He yields, indeed, its full part to pas- 

94 



sion, but a far larger part to law — the law of 
conscience and humanity. The pathos that he 
stirs is of no maudlin or sentimental kind, but 
is purely natural and sincere — gushing, as in 
the last story of Mari Magno, from the flinty 
rock of fact and dire necessity. In this re- 
spect he is a kind of better Crabbe; more full 
of natural tenderness and fine distinctions, if 
less sternly powerful and less deeply tragic. 

But if Clough has nothing in common with 
poets of the De Musset type, he is equally far 
removed from the trivial domesticities of the 
JAngel in the House." Clough was not, in- 
(deed, a misogynist or indifferent to marriage. 
On the contrary, a great number of his poems 
prove that the problems of married love and 
life were among those which most deeply occu- 
pied his mind. But he did not shut his eyes 
and dream that the Enghshman's paradise of 
a clean hearth and a kind wife is the only ob- 
ject of existence, or, that if it were, it would 
be easy to obtain entrance into it. The patient 
insight, refusing to be deceived by any illu- 
sion, however sweet, in its unwavering cour- 

95 



age, which we have traced in his treatment of 
religion, appears no less in his treatment of 
love. He is able to see men and women as 
they are, very imperfect in their affections, 
often too weak even to love without an arriere 
pensee, letting priceless opportmiity slip by, 
and killing the flower of one part of their na- 
tm-e by the drought and drjmess of the other 
part. 

In attempting to illustrate these general 
remarks by an analysis of Clough's poems, we 
might begin with a notice of the tales called 
"Mari Magno," the last of his works, and 
therefore in some ways the ripest product of 
his mind. But these tales are already in 
extenso before the public, and are so hkely to 
be the most popular portion of his works, that 
we may perhaps content ourselves with refer- 
ence to them. The first two are very specu- 
lative. Their moral seems to be that love is 
fellow-service, and that the a peu pres of hu- 
man relations must be accepted cheerfully. 
To follow the absolute, and to expect to real- 
ize an ideal, is vain. Let life school us to love 



90 



as men, with the whole force, indeed, of our 
natures, but with no fantastic yearnings after 
impossibilities. If we fail to learn these les- 
sons, and refuse the natural good of human 
life, we shall be disciplined with disappoint- 
ment. The thought of these two poems is so 
subtle — so delicately shadowed forth and il- 
luminated with cross lights — that in order to 
present a faithful picture of them, it would be 
necessary to transcribe the tales themselves. 
The rest are more simple. They have less of 
speculation and more of incident and human 
^^ pathos. Indeed, the story called "Christian," 
v(Jor the Lawyer's Second Tale, is one of the 
most dramatic poems of its kind in the Enghsh 
language. When we remember that this story 
was actually completed during Clough's last 
hours, while paralysis was rapidly invading 
the very stronghold of life, it forms the most 
convincing proof of the genuine and irresist- 
ible force of his poetic genius. 

"Amours de Voyage" is, perhaps, the most 
highly finished, various, and artistically com- 
plete of all his works. It consists of a series of 

97 



letters supposed to be written from Rome by 
an £ii^isiimaii called Claude, and t^o sisters 
of a family of Trevellyns wbose acquaintance 
&ere. It was composed by Clongh 
in 1848, darmg the short life of Maz- 
RepubKc and tte French siege. The 
inckfeits of iiiis stirring time are so 
into the narrative part of the poem as 
in a striking manner with the Ham- 
kt-&e M ici rriann oi the bi»o's character. *7I 
domtmk ie ttmi, wkime de ramomr^ is one of 
Ae Bottoes on thte title-p«ge: and tiie last two 
coo^ikts of the '^Envoy" well desmbe the pe- 
contrast wkiefa mns ttvoa^ the whole 



r, 1 1211 liittiitg whtMit BBBsy jeus finat brain 
fanin of 

boco. t» 




de Voyage ' has fkree 
jMJijitL : &e criticism ci BoBie frooi a travel- 
ler^s poiDt of view, j a icil f M ig mmnr reigioss 
aad o&etieal icAecboos; |M)i&irs and tihe 



events of the siege: and the love-story of an 
over-refined and irresolute spirit. The two 
former topics are graduallv merged in the last. 
Indeed, they serve chiefly to enliven the poem, 
and to illustrate the character of the sceptical 
hero and his ladyhke inamorata. Clough has 
managed with great dehcacy to introduce the 
theme of love, at first quite incidentally, into 
Claude's letters, and to let it grow by degrees 
until it swallows up the others, and forms the 
whole subject of the poem. But it must not be 
imagined that the love-story is the only im- 
portant part of ''Amours de Voyage." On 
the contrary, there is a singular richness in the 
woof and texture of this poem, a variety which 
we miss in compositions like ''Werther," or 
"Maud," The descriptions of character are 
humorous and racy. Very delicate satire, for 
instance, adds an interest to Miss Georgina's 
letters: and the whole Trevellyn family is hit 
off with dramatic nicety. Claude himself ap- 
pears before us as a many-sided man, and we 
get a good notion of his personality long be- 
fore his love-drama begins. 

99 



Claude is a young English gentleman, well 
born and well connected, but naturally shy and 
rather satirical. His education has rendered 
him fastidious; and he is by temperament in- 
clined to dream and meditate and question 
rather than to act. We soon find that he has 
the trick of introspection, and of nineteenth- 
century yearning after the impossible. It is 
curious that in his delineation of this state of 
mind Clough should remind us of Alfred de 
Musset — his antipodes in moral tone and men- 
tal calibre. Yet it is so. Both poets describe 
the maladie du decle — the nondescript ca- 
chexy, in which aspiration mingles with disen- 
chantment, satire and scepticism with a child- 
like desire for the tranquility of reverence and 
belief — in which self-analysis has been pushed 
to the verge of monomania, and all springs of 
action are clogged and impeded by the cob- 
webs of speculation. But while De Musset 
presents us with a French picture of this con- 
dition, very feeble, sickly, and disagreeable, 
Clough is true to the national vigour of the 
English character. We cannot mistake the 

100 



irony with which he treats Claude, or fall into 
the error of identifying him with the poet. 

Claude's first letters are devoted to the im- 
pressions produced on his mind by Rome. 
"Rubbishy" is the best word he can find to ex- 
press the Eternal City : indeed, it resembles its 
own Monte Testaceo, a ''mass of broken and 
castaway wine-pots." In the midst of such 
grumblings a hint is dropped of a family called 
Trevellyn, who, a letter further on, are thus 
cleverly described: — 



'Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, nat wholly 

Pure of the taint of the shop; will at table-d'hote and 
restaurant 

Have their shilling's worth, their penny's pennyworth 
even: 

Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth! 

Yet they are fairly descended, they give you to know, 
well connected; 

Doubtless somewhere, in some neighbourhood have, and 
are careful to keep, some 

Threadbare genteel relations, who in their turn are en- 
chanted 

Grandly among country-people to introduce at assemblies 

To the unpennied cadets our cousins with excellent for- 
tunes. 

Neither man's aristocracy this, nor God's, God knoweth!" 



101 



Meantime Claude begins to make way with 
these Trevellyns. He owns it is pleasant to be 
with them. His aristocratic refinement and 
fastidious tastes are even shocked at finding 
that he delights in "pleasing inferior people." 
But, after all, it is only a matter of accident 
and travelling sociability, of — 

"Juxtaposition, in short; and what is juxtaposition?" 

This supplies him with much food for very 
Cloughian contemplation. Meantime, a few 
scraps from the Miss Trevellyns to their 
friends introduce us to these young ladies, and 
let us know that Mary thinks Mr. Claude "a 
superior man," but "terribly selfish"; and so 
the first canto ends. The second opens with 
Italian politics. Claude sympathises with the 
patriots more than he chooses to admit, or 
than his habits of disdainful self-analysis per- 
mit him to be aware of. Once or twice he 
flashes into real enthusiasm ; but he never gives 
himself a free rein. In the midst of details 
about the siege, and of wonderings whether he 
would be prepared in the event of danger "to 

102 



lay down his life for the British female," he 
exclaims: "I am in love, meantime, you 
think?" and after, for the space of ten lines, 
articulating the charms of Mary's feminine 
good taste and sense, decides that he "is not 
exactly." Then follows letter after letter 
about love. Claude is clearly getting into the 
thick of it — summoning to his aid all his heavy 
casuistical battalions and squadrons of light 
sophistry. The real misery of a state of mind 
like Claude's is, that it produces a confusion 
in the moral instincts; the higher, as well as 
the lower parts of the nature, become objects 
of dread and suspicion. Claude fears sophis- 
tication in every virtue, and is nervously 
alarmed by his OAvn impulses. It may easily 
be conceived that he puzzles the Trevellyns not 
a little. Georgina thinks Mr. Claude "really 
is too shilly-shally," and induces her own fiance 
to sound him with regard to his intentions as 
to her sister Mary. The third canto opens with 
a series of similar reflections, for Claude is now 
in the very centre of indifference, having cast 
off the No, and not yet reached the Yes of 
loving. 

103 



Then he takes up a question which he had 
suggested at an earlier period. "What is Jux- 
taposition?-' We travel in a railway- train, 
and, to pass the time, talk with the girl we find 
next to us. This is a true allegory of most 
marriages. Yet we prate at the same time 
about "eternal ties and marriages made in 
heaven." But if we really believed in this pre- 
tence — if the bridegroom really thought he 
was linked for ever to the bride — if he did not 
foresee the release of bm^ial while he signed 
the bond of matrimony — how do you think he 
would then accept his situation? Claude's 
friend seems to hint that Juxtaposition may 
be great, but that Affinity is greater. "Ah!" 
says Claude, "there are many affinities of dif- 
ferent degrees and forces: — 

"But none, let me tell you, 
Save by the law of the land and the ruinous force of 

the will, ah. 
None, I fear me, at last quite sure to be final and 

perfect." 

Yet, he sighs, it is pleasant to be deluded, and 
the love-makings of the earth are very beauti- 
ful:— 



104 



"Could we eliminate only 
This vile hungering impulse, this demon within us of 

craving, 
Life were beatitude, living a perfect divine satisfac- 
tion." V 

But soon another word, more abrupt than 
Affinity, more cogent than Juxtaposition, 
breaks the serene sphere of his dubitations like 
a bombshell. It is Obligation. His intentions 
a;re asked. Mary, indeed, has herself never 
held him bound in any way; and this is one of 
her charms in his eyes. Every morning he 
may meet her afresh, and find no old debts to 
pay. But just as Claude is on the eve of 
starting for Florence with the Trevellyns and 
their Vernon friends, one of the latter hints 
that he ought to declare himself one way or the 
other. Thereupon Claude breaks loose, and 
excuses himself from the party: — 

"How could I go? Great heavens! to conduct a per- 
mitted flirtation 
Under those vulgar eyes, the observed of such 
observers." 

This brings us to the fourth canto, when 
Claude, having let his opportunity slip, and 

105 



missed, as he expresses it, the tide in his love 
affairs, feels an irresistible desire to be again, 
at any cost, with Mary Trevellyn. He leaves 
Rome; but they have left Florence, — for 
Milan, it appears. Then follows a weary chase 
after them, through Bellagio, over the Splu- 
gen, the Stelvio; back again to Como, Flor- 
ence, Pisa, and Rome. Every place is 
searched; every friend applied to. But by a 
natural accident of travelling, when once 
missed, they cannot be caught up again. The 
whole of this fifth canto is occupied with hur- 
ryings to and fro, blank researches, and vain 
self-reproaches. There is something piteous 
and pathetic in its feverishness. Mary Trevel- 
lyn, in the meantime, is at Lucerne, waiting, 
not without anxiety, for Claude, and ready, it 
is clear, to make him happy. Indeed, we feel 
that it is very stupid on the part of Claude to 
give her up after so short a pursuit. He is 
meant, however, to be a poor creature, dis- 
tracted by his own waywardness of specula- 
tion, and confused in his impulses. "Amours 
de Voyage" concludes with a series of those 

106 



dubiations, halts, and turning-points of 
thought, in which Clough delighted as an ar- 
tist, and which serve, with admirable irony and 
humour, to pourtray the feebleness of Claude. 
We have entered so fully into the analysis 
of this poem that there is little need for com- 
ment. Yet we cannot refrain from calling at- 
tention to its subtle discussion of a subject 
which to most menisso simple. Clough shows us 
in the character of Claude the effect of a specu- 
lative intellect acting upon the instincts and af- 
fections. We can scarcely wonder that Clough 
is not more generally read and admired, be- 
cause the problems with which he is occupied 
are rare and remote. There are but few char- 
acters like Claude in the world. Indeed, it 
might be wondered, whether it is worth while 
commemorating those perplexed and sceptical 
conditions of the consciousness in verse. Ought 
a poet not rather to lead the world, and to 
show the ultimate truth, than to represent the 
waverings of a discontented spirit ill at ease? 
Clough's vindication, however, lies in this: 
first, that it is the poet's function to hold up a 



mirror to his age, as well as to lead it; and 
secondly, that we still admire Hamlet and 
Faust. Claude belongs to the same race as 
these princes of metaphysical perplexity. 
However exceptional, his scepticism is natural 
to himself, and to the temper of his century. 
In painting him, Clough reproduced the ex- 
perience which he obtained from commerce 
with the world, and drew a picture of his 
times. 

Omitting all notice of the "Bothie," the 
best known of Clough's works, we may now 
proceed to discuss "Dipsychus," a dramatic 
composition which has not yet been given to 
the public. This fact, besides the intrinsic im- 
portance of the poem, which contains in the 
most condensed form, all Clough's speculations 
about life and action, must be our excuse for 
the length of the extracts we propose to make, 
and for the minuteness of our analysis. Hith- 
erto we have seen him occupied with the prob- 
lems of Religion and Love. Having shown 
us the corrosive action of the human intellect 
in both of these fields he comes forward to dis- 



108 



play the further operation of this sceptical 
aqua fortis upon the philsophy of Life itself in 
Dipsychus. The hero of this poem is not, like 
Hamlet, indisposed to fulfil a single and diffi- 
cult duty; or, like Faust, exhausted with the 
world of thought; or, like Claude, unnerved 
for decision and unable to obey his instincts. 
His difficulties are deeper, and more general. 
He passes in review the whole casuistry of 
Life, and Duty, and Action, involving re- 
ligion, love, and morality, in his speculation. 
The theme of the poem is therefore, in some 
sense, the metaphysic or supreme abstraction 
of Human Doubt. 

It was written at a period of the poet's life 
when he was thinking and feeling deeply about 
the choice of work. Oxford had been given 
up. University Hall, in London, had not 
proved very satisfactory. Clough felt the need 
of action, without confidence in any special 
sort of action. Subtle analysis and high 
aspirations seemed to unfit him for the coarser 
work of the world. Mere pleasure or the lux- 
ury of living or domestic felicity could not sat- 

109 



isfy the whole of such a nature. He asked 
himself, What is to be done? What is the 
value of any work that a man can do? How 
shall we preserve the soul's virginity upon the 
crowded highways of the world? Is it worth 
while to sacrifice beautiful illusions for doubt- 
ful truths of fact? Is it right to exchange the 
poet's golden sunset skies for the world's pal- 
pable coin — itself the root of all evil as well 
as of all comfort? 

These meditations are cast in the mould of 
a dialogue between a man's soul and a spirit. 
But the title "Dipsychus" seems to intimate 
that the spirit is but a mode of the soul which 
externalises itself. Or, to speak more clearly, 
this spirit is not the true man, but it is that 
second self which usage with the world and the 
unnumbered centuries of human tradition have 
imposed upon the soul. Clough calls him 
Mephistopheles and Belial. He is made to 
name himself Cosmarchon or Cosmocrator: — 

"This worldly fiend that follows you about, 
This compound of convention and impiety, 
This mongrel of uncleanness and propriety." 

110 



He is in truth the spirit of this world, the spirit 
of fact and reality, as opposed to aspirations 
and ideals, the spirit of those conditions under 
which men have to labour in their commerce 
with the world ; the spirit of those lower neces- 
sities which environ action. Reflection, it was 
long ago said by the philosophers, belongs to 
God and to godlike men. But action is proper 
to mankind and to the mass of human beings. 
By cleaving to action we renounce our heav- 
enly birthright of contemplation. Yet if we 
confine ourselves to reflection and aspiration, 
we separate ourselves from the life of men. No 
one has yet solved the problem of acting with- 
out contracting some stain of earth. 

The form of Dipsychus and the character 
of the Spirit remind us of Faust, and prove 
that Clough was to a certain extent influenced 
by Goethe's great work. But the problems 
agitated by Clough are of a more subtle and 
spiritual nature than those which Goethe 
raised. They are worked out with less atten- 
tion to artistic finish and dramatic eflPect than 
the speculations which underly the play of 

111 



"Faust." In their narrow compass they strike 
many students as being more forcible in 
thought and more full of feeling than the medi- 
tative scenes of Goethe's drama. Clough was 
content to be wholly undramatic and monoton- 
ous. Instead of presenting us with numerous 
highly-coloured pictures, he dissected a por- 
tion of the troubled brain of one man with 
marvellous skill and delicacy. Thus the two 
works are essentially different in their scope 
and aim ; and the resemblance between them is 
superficial. Besides, the Spirit in "Dipsy- 
chus" has not much in common with the 
Mephistopheles of Goethe. We find in 
"Dipsychus" no tempter beyond the casuist 
that everyone carries in his bosom ; no contract 
but that which everyone makes when he leaves 
the Thebaid of his contemplation for the serv- 
ice and the pay of the great world ; no greater 
duality of existence than that which every self- 
conscious man of the century contains within 
his own nature. The dialogues of Dipsychus 
and the Spirit are the communings of a heart 
given to self-examination. Their strife is a 

112 



modern version of the old battle carried on 
betv, een the S;:irit and the flesh, or rather be- 
tween St. Paul's Pneumatic and Psychic, 
spiritual and natural, man. But the strife is 
even, and no Zeus holds the balance. The com- 
batants are twins, inseparable in this life. The 
one that is the stronger, though confessedly 
the viler, rules the other, because he conformed 
to the existing conditions under which the in- 
dividual is forced to live and act. The fate of 
the forlorn, indignant, and defrauded soul is 
hidden from us at the end. Dipsychus seeks 
to act as a man, and not to keep aloof from 
human passions and the pains of life; but in 
doing so he falls, and is entangled in the snares 
of the w orld. It is hard to say how Clough in- 
tended his dram.a to conclude. The second 
part of "Dipsychus," as we have it, is incom- 
plete. But so far as one can judge from this 
fragment, one is surprised at the common- 
place and rather vulgar denouement which the 
poet seems to have designed. It contrasts so 
strangely with the elevated and subtle tone of 
the first part, and forms so distinct a bathos 

113 



or anti-climax, that we are disposed to aban- 
don any attempt at its interpretation, believ- 
ing that in its present mutilated state it cannot 
be fairly criticised, and to confine our atten- 
tion to the first part. This part consists of a 
series of short scenes, which fall naturally into 
two chief groups. In the first of these groups 
Dipsychus and the Spirit discuss several ques- 
tions of theology and social ethics, setting forth 
in broad and well-defined contrast the double 
point of view which may be taken by a scrupu- 
lous and an easy conscience; the discord be- 
tween the spirit of the Gospel and the spirit of 
the world ; and the divergence between a crav- 
ing after spiritual things and an acquiescence 
in the order of carnal and conventional rou- 
tine. The second group is devoted exclusively 
to the casuistry of action. 

**Dipsychus" opens at Venice, with a remi- 
niscence of "Easter Day." Though the scene 
is changed, and months have passed, the old 
refrain of "Christ is not risen," keeps running 
in the poet's head. The Resurrection, in any 
real and modern sense of the word, is just as 

114 



inconceivable at Venice as at Naples. The 
spirit of Christianity is just as absent from the 
Rialto as from the Toledo. While Dipsychus 
is repeating the opening lines of "Easter 
Day," the Spirit intervenes and begins to criti- 
cise it: — 

"Dear, how odd! 
Hell tell us next there is no God. 
I thought 'twas in the Bible plain, 
On the third day He rose again." 

The Spirit accepts all that the world has 
agreed to believe — all the ouoUyovixha and 
stereotyped conventions of his Church and 
State. Theology and metaphysics, indeed, are 
not his trade. But he recommends general re- 
ligious observances as a matter of prudential 
policy, and occupies a pew on Sundays in 
obedience to the third commandment of his own 
amended Decalogue : — 

"Oh, 

You'll go to church, of course, you know; 
Or, at the least, will take a pew 
To send your wives and servants to. 
Trust me, I make a point of that; 
No infidelity ,--that's flat." 

115 



On the present occasion at Venice, however, 
he prefers to enjoy the sun, and watch the 
humours of the crowd on the Piazza. Dipsy- 
chus converses with him, sullenly enough, and 
they carry on their dialogue through a visit to 
the Public Gardens, where the higher musings 
of the man are constantly broken with ever so 
slight a revelation of the spirit's carnal nature. 
Dipsychus is disgusted, and exclaims : — 

"0 moon and stars, forgive! and thou, clear heaven, 
Look pureness back into me. Oh, great God! 
Why, why, in wisdom and in grace^s name, 
And in the name of saints and saintly thoughts, 
Of mothers, and of sisters, and chaste wives. 
And angel woman-faces we have seen. 
And angel woman-spirits we have guessed. 
And innocent sweet children, and pure love, 
V/hy did I ever one brief moment's space 
But parley with this filthy Belial? 
Was it the fear 

Of being behind the world, which is the wicked?" 

But when he has regained his hotel, the Spirit 
begins once more to reason with him on the 
duties of society, and the necessities of acquies- 
cence in the ways of the world. Social con- 
ventions are discussed; Dipsychus fretting 
against formal lies and diplomacy of manners 

116 



and outward show, the Spirit proving how wise 
it is to leaven our sincerity with tact, our purity 
with savoir fcdre, the dove with the serpent, 
piety with pohsh. His final argument on all 
these points is that, — 

"What we all love is good touched up with evil: 
Religion's self must have a spice of devil." 

Or again: — 

"Life little loves; 'tis true, this peevish piety; 
E'en they with whom it thinks to be securest — 
Your most religious, delicatest, purest — 
Discern and show, as pious people can. 
Their feeling that you are not quite a man." 

The same argument is reasoned on a differ- 
ent thesis, after Dipsychus has been insulted 
by a Croat, and the Spirit is urging him to 
seek satisfaction. Here, as before, Dipsychus 
wants to adhere to the pure precepts of the 
Gospel. The Spirit shows how unfit they are 
for actual life, and sums up with a crushing 
satire on his comrade's peaceful mood. 

In the next scene we are on our way to the 
Lido, and the question, "Is there no God?" is 
being reasoned by the two spirits — Dipsychus 
taking the mournful and regretful side, ex- 

117 



pressing the sadness of a soul that longs to 
believe in a God and hears it knelled that there 
is none, while the Spirit makes the best of 
things, and shows that we can get on very well 
without one. The little song, "There is no 
God, the wicked saith," occurs in this scene. 
In the second Act — if we may use this word 
to express the group of unconnected scenes 
which follow — we are brought to consider the 
great problem of the choice of work. Here we 
may admire that subtlety of modern thought, 
which seeks no longer with the ancient philoso- 
phers a Criterion of Happiness or Knowledge, 
or with the theologians a Criterion of Faith, 
but which, having, as it were, abandoned hap- 
piness, knowledge, and faith, as hopeless and 
irresoluble questions, to their fate, is no less 
puzzled to discover the Criterion of Life itself 
— of Action — of a man's place in the world of 
men. This part opens with a further discus- 
sion of the thoughts suggested by * 'Easter 
Day," in which the Spirit takes occasion to 
develop his religious opinions, and thus im- 
presses their practical result upon Dipsy- 

chus : — 

118 



"Take larger views (and quit your Germana) 
From the Analogy and Sermons; 
I fancied, you must doubtless know, — 
Butler had proved, an age ago, 
That in religious, as profane things, 
'Twas useless trying to explain things; 
Men's business -wits, the only sane things. 
These and compliance are the main things. 
God, Revelation, and the rest of it, 
Bad at the best, we make the best of it. 
Like a good subject and wise man. 
Believe whatever things you can. 
Take your religion as 'twas found you, 
And say no more of it, confound you!" 

Then, while afloat in his gondola, Dipsychus 
begins to wish that all life were after this 
wise : — 

"How light we move, how softly! Ah, 
Were life but as the gondola! 
So live, nor need to call to mind 
Our slaving brother here behind!" 

The contemplative indisposition for action 
in Dipsychus is mocked and baffled by the per- 
plexing and tormenting riddles which the in- 
equalities of the world offer to his mind. Life 
might be beautiful, and enjoyable, and easy, 
he thinks, were it not for a craving within us 
after the unseen, and could we divest ourselves 

119 



of all sympathy for our toiling, suffering fel- 
low-creatures. In this mood, riches and lux- 
urious pleasures seem to him "mere insolence 
and wantonness." But the Spirit, as may be 
imagined, shares none of these difficulties. He 
sings "How pleasant it is to have money, 
heigho!" and sums up his Welt-philosophie 
in two common-place stanzas: — 

"The world is very odd, we see, 
We do not comprehend it; 
But in one fact we all agree, 
God won't, and we can't mend it. 

"Being common sense, it can't be sin 

To take it as I find it; 
The pleasure to take pleasure in; 
The pain, try not to mind it." 

To these verses Dipsychus replies with the 
exquisite lines, "O let me love my love unto 
myself, alone," which have been printed in the 
volume of Clough's published poems. 

In the next scene Dipsychus resolves to 
commune more seriously with the Spirit, and 
to question him. The design is scarcely formed 
before the Spirit is at his elbow, and Dipsy- 
chus, after some hesitation, asks: — 



120 



"Should I form, a thing to be supposed, 
A wish to bargain for your merchandise, 
Say what were your demands? — what were your terms? — 
What should I do? What should I cease to do? 
What incense on what altars must I bum? 
And what abandon? What unlearn or learn? 
Religion goes, I take it." 

By no means, replies the Spirit. We have here 
no blood-signed contract, no tragic price of 
soul's damnation for the pomps and pleasures 
of the flesh. All you have to do is to follow the 
world's ways — take orders, if you like, but 
keep within the serviceable limits of routine 
religion, and do not indulge in vague emo- 
tions. If that does not suit you, choose the 
law. Marry, too, by all means; and — 

"Trust one who knows you, 
You'll make an admirable Sposo." 

This is the result of the incarnation. Dipsy- 
chus, with his high-flown aspirations and shy 
sensitiveness, is cast upon a sea of doubt. He 
seeks action, and has to choose between two 
common-place professions. The Spirit of the 
world tempts him with no magnificent pleas- 
ures, with no promises of power. Sneering at 

411 . . .4 



him, he offers in exchange for his soul's vir- 
ginity the merest humdrum of diurnal life in 
a marriage without illusions and a business 
without enthusiasms. Dipsychus is fairly 
staggered : — 

"I had hoped 
Midst weakness, indolence, frivolity, 
Irresolution, still had hoped; and this 
Seems sacrificing hope." 

Would it not be better, he asks, to wait — to 

let inferior opportunities shp by, and to seize 

the supreme chance of heroic action when it 

comes? But what if, when it comes, we should 

prove incapable of seizing it or using it by 

want of action? Is it not safer to engage in 

the great battle as a conmion soldier, and work 

up to the captaincy? — 

"High deeds 
Haunt not the fringy edges of the fight, 
But the pell-mell of men." 

Yet again there is danger in this course. We 
may reasonably fear — 

"In the deft trick 
Of prentice handling to forget great art, 
To base mechanical adroitness yield 
The Inspiration and the Hope a Slave!" 

12Q 



Ah, but suppose I relinquish action alto- 
gether? Even that is unsafe : — 

"Contamination taints the idler first." 

I will away with hesitation, at last he cries, 

and obey my instinct — if only, alas! I had an 

instinct ! — 

"No, no: 

The life of instinct has, it seems, gone by, 
And will not be forced back. And to live now, 
I must sluice out myself into canals, 
And lose all force in ducts. The modem Hotspur 
Shrills not his trumpet of *To Horse, To Horse!' 
But consults columns in a Railway Guide." 

But even thus to act, humbly and by routine, 
might be sufficient for the yearnings of the 
soul, if only we could believe that the work 
done were worth doing, and that we were inte- 
gral and indispensable parts of the life of the 
great world: — 

"If indeed it work. 
And is not a mere treadmill! which it may be, 
Who can confirm it is not? We ask action, 
And dream of arms and conflict; and string up 
All self-devotion's muscles; and are set 
To fold up papers. To what end?— we know not. 
Other folks do so; it is always done; 
And it perhaps is right." 

m 



After all, if really bidden to bathe in this com- 
mon-place Jordan of unapparent efficacy, let 
us bathe. "I submit." As an echo to this 
word the Spirit is heard from within singing: — 

"Submit, submit! 
'Tis common sense and human wit 
Can claim no higher name than it." 

Still, though on the verge of action, Dipsy- 
chus wavers. Is he now, so swiftly and irre- 
vocably, "to lose in action, passion, talk, the 
soul?" To abandon, for the uncertain good of 
work in the world, those moments of illumina- 
tion which have come upon him hitherto at 
intervals, and seemed to solve the riddle? — 

"0 happy hours! 

compensation ample for long days 

Of what impatient tongues call wretchedness!" 
"No, no! 

1 am contented, and will not complain. 
To the old paths, my soul! O, be it so! 
I bear the work-day burden of dull life 
Above these footsore flags of a weary world, 
Heaven knows how long it has not been; at once, 
Lo! I am in the Spirit on the Lord's day 

With John in Patmos. Is it not enough, 
Ono day in seven? and if this should go, 



If this pure solace should desert my mind, 
What were all else? I dare not risk this loss. 
To the old paths, my soul!" 

Overhearing this soliloquy, the Spirit 
gibes : — 

"Oh, yes. 
To moon about religion; to inhume 
Your ripened age in solitary walks. 
For self -discussion; to debate in letters 
Vext points with earnest friends; past other men 
To cherish natural instincts, yet to fear them 
And less than any use them .... 

to pervert 

Ancient real facts to modem unreal dreams. 
And build up baseless fabrics of romance 
And heroism upon heroic sand; 
To bum forsooth, for action, yet despise 
Its merest accidence and alphabet." 
* * * ♦ ♦ 

"Once in a fortnight say, by lucky chance. 
Of happier-tempered coffee, gain (great Heaven!) 
A pious rapture." 

We regret that our space admits of only 
these broken extracts from a speech which is 
full of the most searching satire on a scholar's 
solitary life — of irony terrible in its remorse- 
less truth — of worldly wisdom crushing down 
in proud superiority of strength the dreamy 

1215 



aspirations of a timid soul. Dipsychus, stung 
and quickened by a sense of his own impotence 
and by the ruthless logic of the carping voice, 
cries with a return of discontented determina- 
tion : — 

"Must it be, then? So quick upon my thought 
To follow the fulfilment and the deed? 
I counted not on this. I counted ever 
To hold and turn it over in my hands 
Much longer." 

Yet he cannot now escape the law which his 
own speculations have imposed on him. It is 
in vain that the thirst for action leaves him for 
a moment, and he cries : — 

"What need for action yet? I am happy now; 
I feel no lack. What cause is there for haste? 
Am I not happy? Is not that enough?" 

bidding the Spirit depart. The Spirit will not 
go, but turns upon him with a new menace : — 

"What! you know not that I too can be serious, 
Can speak big words, and use the tone imperious, 
Can speak, not honiedly, of love and beauty, 
But sternly of a something much like Duty." 

The casuistry of action becomes very serious 
when the voice of the world imposes upon the 

126 



soul one of its own laws, and goads it on by 
an appeal to its own higher impulses. Dipsy- 
chus is daunted and shaken: — 

"It must be, then. I feel it in my soul; 
The iron enters, sundering flesh and bone, 
And sharper than the two-edged sword of God. 
I come into deep waters. Help, oh help! 
The floods run over me. 

Therefore, farewell! — a long and last farewell, 
Ye pious sweet simplicities of life, 
Good books, good friends, and holy moods, and all 
That lent rough life sweet Sunday-seeming rests, 
Making earth heaven-like. Welcome, wicked world! 
The hardening heart, the calculating brain. 
Narrowing its doors to thought, the lying lips, 
The calm-dissembling eyes, the greedy flesh. 
The world, the devil, — ^welcome, welcome, welcome!" 

In the midst of this mental anguish and 
moral conflict, the Spirit of the world sneers 
at him. What are you dreading to give up? 
What is the work you have set yourself? Is 
it literature — novels, reviews, poems, perhaps 
a little philosophising — vague scepticism, 
dilettante dreamings about life? Or else you'll 
try teaching and tutoring of youth, not so as to 
absorb your whole time, but always keeping 
leisure for your meditations and illuminations : 

127 



"Heartily you will not take to anything; 
Whatever happen, don't I see you still 
Living no life at all? Even as now 
An o'ergrown baby, sucking at the dugs 
Of instinct, dry long since. Come, come! you are old 

enough 
For spoon-meat, surely. 

Will you go on thus 
Until death end you? If indeed it does: 
For what it does, none knows. Yet as for you, 
You'll hardly have the courage to die outright; 
You'll somehow halve even it. Methinks I see you. 
Through everlasting limboes of void time, 
Twirling and twiddling ineffectively, 
And indeterminately swaying for ever.'* 

In this way, with continual sarcasms and 
much home truth, seasoned with a reiteration 
of the philosophy of submission, the Spirit 
drives Dipsychus on to engage in the world's 
work. Having bowed and given up the con- 
test, Dipsychus still abjures his counsellor: — 

"Not for thy service, thou imperious fiend. 
Not to do thy work or the like of thine; 
Not to please thee, base and fallen spirit! 
But one Most High, Most True, whom, without Thee, 
It seems I cannot." 

He still sets the law of life and the law of the 
Gospel at variance: 

128 



"Do we owe fathers nothing — mothers nought? 
Is filial duty folly? Yet He says, 
'He that loves father, mother, more than Me;' 
Yea, and *the man his parents shall desert,* 
The ordinance says, 'and cleave unto his wife.' 
man, behold thy wife!' the hard, naked world; 
Adam, accept thy Eve!" 

With many protestations, and reservations, 
and antinomian arguments, Dipsychus at 
length accepts the yoke of the prince of this 
world, not without having his eyes open to 
what he is about, but seeing no other course. 
And the Spirit says: — 

"0, goodness! won't you find it pleasant 
To own the positive and present; 
To see yourself like people round, 
And feel your feet upon the ground!" 

After this long analysis of Dipsychus, we 
have only to call attention to the skill with 
which Clough has sustained his two characters. 
In the course of their protracted dialogue, 
they never change, except in so far as an al- 
teration of will and purpose is wrought in the 
weaker spirit by the stronger and more persis- 
tent tempter. The force of unscrupulous and 
narrow power, firmly planted upon the solid 

129 



facts of common life, is displayed with won- 
derful vigor by the poet, in his Mephistopheles, 
who, at the same time, has never failed to make 
the most of the hmnours and satirical side of 
his character. There is nothing tragic in this 
Mephistopheles, just as there is nothing tragic 
(melodramatically speaking) in the final con- 
cession of Dipsychus. But beneath the ironi- 
cal sneers of the one, and the helpless struggles 
of the other, lurks the deep and subtle tragedy 
of human life and action — of free souls caged, 
and lofty aspirations curbed — a vulgar and 
diurnal tragedy over which no tears are shed 
in theatres, but which, we might imagine, stirs 
the sorrow of the angels day by day as they 
look down upon our world. 

This same most piteous chord is touched 
even more deeply and with a keener sense of 
hopelessness in the poem called "The Ques- 
tioning Spirit" — one of the most perfect 
among Clough's earlier compositions, written, 
perhaps, at the darkest and most troubled 
period of his life, on the theme of what may be 
described as the Criterion of Dut5\ As an- 

ISO 



other appendix or gloss upon the philosophy of 
Dipsychus, we may mention the lines begin- 
ning, "Duty — that's to say complying," the 
concentrated verjuice of the satire of which is 
very characteristic of one of Clough's moods. 
An answer or antidote to these more gloomy 
views of common life is found in the elegiac 
lines beginning, "Hope evermore and believe, 
O man!" which contain this cheerful stoicism: 

"Not for the gain of the gold; for the getting, the hoard- 
ing, the having; 
But for the joy of the deed; but for the Duty to do." 

It remains to consider Clough's artistic 
qualities more in detail than we have hitherto 
done. But neither is it easy to do this, nor 
have we left ourselves much space for doing it 
in. In the course of our notice, however, we 
have been at pains to select passages for quota- 
tion which might illustrate his style, as well as 
supply the matter necessary for explaining his 
subject. There is a certain dryness, hardness, 
and severity — a want of colour, tone, and rich- 
ness — in most of what Clough has written. In 
daily life he was a man of few words, and diffi- 

1«1 



cult utterance; nor does he seem ever to have 
gained real facility of poetical expression. His 
last poems, the "Mari Magno Tales," have in- 
deed more fluency; but here the copia verb- 
orum tends to a somewhat prosaic prolixity, 
instead of adding warmth and splendour to his 
style. Those readers who have accustomed 
their ears to the sublime harmonies of Milton, 
or to the exquisite lyrical music of Shelley, or 
to the more artificially melodious rhythms of 
Mr. Swinburne, or to Tennyson's elegant and 
complex cadences, will complain that Clough 
is harsh and unadorned. He rough-hews in- 
deed (as it has been said) like a Cyclops; but 
he cannot finish like a Canova. Occasionally 
he attains to perfect style and form per saltuvi, 
by a sudden flash of native energy and fire. 
He pours forth torrid thought and feeling like 
a lava yet into the adamantine mould of stately 
and severe expression. "Easter Day" is a speci- 
men of this success. The poem owes nothing 
to its rhythm, or its rhymes, or the beauty of 
its imagery, or the music of its language. It 
is plain and natural, and without allurements 

182 



of any sort. But the emotion is so intense, 
and so thoroughly expressed — the thought is 
so vigorous and vital in every line — that the 
grandest poetry is wrought out of the com- 
monest materials, apparently without effort, 
and by the mere intensity of the poet's will. 
"Easter Day" is a bronze poem. It is the most 
perfect illustration in English literature of the 
artistic canons which Wordsworth preached, 
and upon which his own practice brought con- 
tempt. "Qui laborat orat" and many more of 
the minor religious poems are likewise cast of 
red-hot feeling, in a stern and simple mould. 

But, such being the style by which alone 
Clough attains to excellence, it follows that 
when he is not perfectly simple and clear he 
has no excuse: when he is prolix he becomes 
prosy. There is no gorgeousness of language, 
pomp of sound, or playfulness of fancy to 
cover the faults of ill-constructed or feebly- 
designed poems, and to yield ample matter for 
quotation when the subject fails to interest. 

Passing to matters of mere detail, we may 
observe that Clough apparently rhymed with 



some difficulty, and that he was too fond of 
a jingHng refrain carried through a poem of 
many stanzas, as in the lyrics of "Dipsychus." 
It was only when he felt with intensity, and 
when the expression of his feeling welled up 
spontaneously within his heart and overflowed, 
that his poems were perfect; and then we 
imagine that few writers had the power of 
more exactly and touchingly saying what they 
wished. 

Connected, apparently, with this inade- 
quacy of utterance in any of the more complex 
and rhymed forms of verse, was his predilec- 
tion for hexameters. The English hexameter 
has always been confessed to be a somewhat 
rough and jolting metre, when compared with 
heroic or blank verse or the Spenserian stanza. 
Yet it served Clough's purpose. In those 
loose, yet rhythmical lines he was able to ex- 
press with the exact fidelity required by his 
artistic conscience all essential realities of fact, 
all deHcate shades of feeling — to turn from 
sentiment to satire, from the incidents of travel 
to aesthetical or religious meditations, from 

U4i 



landscape pictures to philosophy or argument 
or analysis. A good judge of poetry has lately 
pronounced it as his opinion that Clough never 
intended his hexameters for metre, but for ca- 
denced prose. But it is impossible that Clough 
could have meant these hexameters for an es- 
say in prose, since they are utterly unlike any 
sort or kind of prose writing, and are extremely 
suggestive, to say the least, of Horace's 
epistles and of Goethe. No artist of taste 
would make experiments in one species of writ- 
ing by importing into it the peculiar rhythm 
of another species. If a man chooses to cast 
his thought into the world-old form of the 
hexameter, he is not asking us to compare him 
with the "Rehgio Medici," the "Areopagitica," 
the "Opium Eater," and "Modern Painters," 
but with the "Iliad," the "De Rerum Natura," 
"Hermann and Dorothea," and "Evangeline." 
Judged by these latter standards, Mr. Clough 
takes a high place for the subtlety, variety, 
and racy flavour of originality which he has 
imparted to this ancient vehicle of thought. 
His hexameters are sui generis j unlike those of 



any other writer in any language, and better, 
we venture to assert, in spite of Mr. Arnold, 
than those of any other English author. If he 
sets prosody at defiance, and makes such 
dactyls as "pace slowly," he yet produces 
periods of majestic and sonorous music like 
those which might be quoted from the earlier 
parts of "Amours de Voyage." But, leaving 
these questions of style and form, we may pass 
to other poetical quahties of Mr. Clough. In 
his painting from nature, and in his descrip- 
tions of character, we trace the marvellous sin- 
cerity and accuracy of his mind. The "Bothie" 
is full of the most delightful pictures of high- 
land scenery, the fidelity of which can only be 
tested by a minute comparison of Clough's 
words with the actual places they refer to. 
"Amours de Voyage," in the same way, yields 
many most highly finished and exquisitely 
faithful pictures of Rome. Everything 
Clough wrote he drew from personal experi- 
ence as far as the locahty and mise en scene 
are concerned. And this accounts for the strict 
truthfulness to nature which we find in his chief 

poems. 

136 



As for his power of analysing and sustain- 
ing character, for his irony and humour, and 
pathos, we have ab-eady said and quoted 
enough to show that he possesses these higher 
faculties of genius in no small degree. What 
is particularly important in the present age of 
literature, he is powerful without being osten- 
tatious, passionate and intense without ex- 
travagance, profound without obscurity, per- 
fectly simple in form and solid in matter. He 
is a poet who will bear being frequently read; 
and who, each time we read him, astonishes us 
with some fresh beauty, or some new reach of 
thought. 



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